Home Network Bottlenecking

[SINND3R]

Hello all. I hope everyone had a good Xmas. My question regards a home network I hope to have up soon. At my house, we have ADSL. I use it mostly for large downloads *cough* and gaming ping. Thanks to this Xmas' incoming money, I am buying a 1ghz system and giving my sister the old one. She will be online with me when the network is up but all she does is chat on AIM and check main (not requiring DSL). So, if I put in a 56k Modem instead of an EtherX card into her system, will it bottleneck her speeds and make it so she can't screw up my speeds at all?

[mosquito]

Just install a second nic in your machine, connect it with a crossed cable to hers and enable ICS (on W98 or W2K, otherwise use sygate or something else). The overhead created by chat and mail is nothing. I am connected with 3PC's on one Cable connection (all playing counterstrike), and I don't experience any lag due to the sharing of the connection. Most lag is caused by slow servers, not by a slow connection on your side (except with modem).

[SINND3R]

Ok, will do. Thank you

[Charliey]

What type of connection does your ADSL use? With mine, i can just plug the modem into the ethernet hub, then each computer can access the internet directly with each comp. My adsl uses PPPOE. your modem and provider have to support multi-users.

[mosquito]

If you use ICS, your modem does not know that multiple machines are connected (only the proxy machine is exposed)