"Ian Northeast" wrote in message
...
Julian Hales wrote:

HI

added another pc, on the 8 port hub when i transfer files over from pc's
to
the new one the orange collision led lights up, not sure what that
means.

It means you're getting collisions Collisions occur when two machines
simultaneously test the network to see if it is busy, find it is not, so
send their packets. As they both do it at the same time they then detect
that there is other traffic on the network so they both back off and try
again. The retry interval should be random, to minimise the chance of a
second collision. It's inefficient but does not cause any error.
Collisions can happen with a single connection, as both machines may try
to send a packet to each other at the same time.

I am downloading off the web ok thru my hubrouterbroadband but wanted
another machine for sone lan games is this gonna be a problem?

Probably not, collisions are normal when using a hub. This is because
hubs are dumb devices which just reflect all inputs onto all outputs,
you can only have one packet going over a hub at a time. The more
machines you put on a hub the more collisions you will get.

It's a problem if things get slow because there are too many collisions.
If your network is not as fast as you think it should be, and your games
get sluggish (it will mainly affect them), and the collision light is on
a lot, consider upgrading to a switch. Switches are more intelligent and
send packets only to the ports they are intended for, and are
bidirectional, so packets can go AB and BA simultaneously. Collisions
should be extremely rare on a switch. This machine has been up 2 months,
has transferred 48 million packets and has had no collisions. And they
are not very expensive nowadays. My no-name 16 port one from Scan was
64UKP. It works fine. 8 port ones can be had quite a bit cheaper.

Regards, Ian

thanks, makes sense. 3 of the router ports are straight to nics, the other
goes to the hub, which leaves 7 ports. im getting a red led partition light
now.

I presumed it was due to both accessing at the same time.