By Tikkler - September 13, 2000

Infobox

Product Reviewed: Switched 10/100 Network in a Box Product Page Manufacturer: Linksys Home Page Suggested Retail Price: $89 USD

The summer of 1996 was the time when I really started to drill into computers and technology. That year was the year when I first got my "serious" computer, a Pentium 75. That baby came loaded with 8MB of RAM, a spacious, never-before seen 850MB of hard disk space (in fact, the hard drive is still being used on one of my lesser-important computers for temporary storage) and came with a blazing-fast 4X CD-ROM, a HUGE 15" monitor, and, gasp PCI slots! All this and my parents only paid only $3000 (in cash, mind you)! What an incredible deal!

2 years later, I finally got fed up with Windows 95 crawling on this slow bugger and opted to upgrade the system. Keeping just the case, sound card, video card and monitor, I spent $1500 to upgrade the core components of the system-the CPU to a Pentium MMX 200MHz, a new motherboard, 32MB of RAM and a very spacious 3.2GB Quantum hard drive (which, like the 850MB one, is still chugging along fine in one of my other systems). Later on, I added another 32MB of RAM for a total of 64MB and installed a new ATI Rage Pro video card. That system kept me happy for a long time, until, finally, it didn't suit my needs either.

February 2000: a new upgrade was inevitable. Windows 98 was beginning to crawl slower and slower, I wasn't really taking advantage of Windows 2000's new improved speed and my hard drive was running low on space. Even with the 128MB of memory that I had plugged in as a last-minute system-saver and the Rage Pro graphics accelerator, I wasn't able to play most of the new games and was limited to 5FPS in Quake 3 Arena; like I said, an upgrade was inevitable. This time, I made a huge jump, upgrading to a blazing-fast Athlon 650MHz system with 192MB of memory and an IBM 20GB (7200 RPM, mind you) hard drive, this system was one of the fastest systems within a 2 mile radius (and still is, only it's been cut down to something like 0.5 miles)-all this for a bulky $1000.

After all these upgrades and all these new parts, I had a stack of them lying around! My Pentium MMX 200MHz CPU and motherboard was still there, along with 64MB of memory and that old sound card that came with the Pentium 75 system and the ATI Rage Pro video card. So, I built myself another system so my little bro can play on and parents have something to fiddle with. Plus, since I have had cable for quite some time now, I could even share that connection with the other computer so that both computers could have almost unlimited bandwidth.

My point? More and more households are finding that they have more than one computer system lying around and would like to do more with those computers than just play solitaire on. Businesses who have existing networks in place are beginning to find that their initial network architecture of a few hubs just isn't enough to deliver the amount of bandwidth to each and every computer on that network like it used to be before. Computers are growing rapidly in numbers and there's gotta be a descent and affordable method to connect them all.

I've been running a home network for quite some time now. A couple of no-name "combo" network interface cards that I picked up for $5 each at some computer swap meet and a cheap coaxial cable has been the infrastructure between my many computers for quite some time.

Speed on this network was quite decent, to be honest; I was able to reach about 5Mbps average speed between all the computers, which is actually quite good for a 10Mbps maximum speed 10Base2 network. The pain in this cheap network solution was, however, that it kept on "breaking apart" and simply could not handle heavy loads. Yes, you heard right, the network actually broke apart for no apparent reason. Every now and then, the cable would slip and the connection between the cable and the connector on one of the network cards would break; since I was using a 10Base2-type network, when one computer breaks, the entire network breaks. I would have to go and snoop around all the computers to find where the cable got disconnected, which usually takes at least 15 mins of my time at the least. Of course, during this downtime, no Internet access would be available for any of the "slave" computers and there was no form of communication between them as well.

In another situation, the network simply would not be able to handle large file transfers through Network Neighborhood. Every now and then I would transfer some CD images from one computer to another-each image is about 650MB in size-and I find that I can only transfer one of these files every so hours. If I tried to transfer any other file over the network after that first file, Windows would just give me a "connection broken" message about 10 seconds into the transfer-not fun. I think this was because of the cable "heating up" or getting too much load at one time, but it's just so annoying having to wait those hours and only then being able to transfer data again.

So, you can imagine how happy I was when I stumbled upon Linksys' Switched 10/100 Network in a Box. The network in a box concept isn't a new one, as I've seen plenty of them from other manufacturers before such as D-Link or NetGear. Basically, these packages include everything that you need to network 2 computers together. Fortunately, the Linksys package that we received had something extra to add to this idea...

On to: The Kit