On 17 Oct 2007 at 11:29, Andrew Raaberg wrote:

>   both of the ports are gigabit, they are side by side, just to
> experiment i plugged both into a router, that is unconfigured, this
> router has one line leading to my cable modem, i am pretty sure the
> category wires are capable of a gigabit connection, still according to
> vista both are running a 100Mbps connection, but the second has not
> sent or recieved nearly as many packets as the 1st. 

  In order to run gigabit over the cables, the device interfaces at both end 
have to be capable of gigabit speed, as well as the cables themselves.  In 
order to use both interfaces for the same connection, the devices at bothe 
ends must be configured to know that these connections are supposed to be 
"teamed".  While gig ports may be starting to show up on SOHO routers, 
teamind configs are not usually supported.
    
>   one time i plugged one cat 6 into one port from my modem and the
> other port i ran a cat5e line to another computer, so the connection
> was modem to vista computer to xp home computer, this didnt achieve
> what i wanted it to because i dont know how to configure these
> connections...or even what is possible, 

Although bridging *Might* allow this to work, ICS (Internet Connection 
Sharing) is the more common way to configure this.  But neither will be as 
good as plugging the second computer into a second LAN port on the router.
    
>   operating systems and software compatibilities make things confusing
> too, i was hoping that if i plugged things in the os would know what
> was going on, but i only wanted that for a quick fix, i would much
> rather be able to do this myself, 

  No, the OS needs to be told what it should do.  TCP/IP and Ethernet were 
designed long before anyone conceived of Plug-and-Play.
    
David Gillett

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