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My desktop came with 2 places to plug in ethernet plugs. If I have only one router, will I get a benefit from plugging two ports into my desktop? If not, why do you think they're there? Just so I could hook two computers up directly while still being on the internet or something?

Some people use another computer to connect to the internet instead of using a hub/router.

I have heard of no such benefit of connecting yourself to your router twice.

Menlaan wrote:My desktop came with 2 places to plug in ethernet plugs. If I have only one router, will I get a benefit from plugging two ports into my desktop? If not, why do you think they're there? Just so I could hook two computers up directly while still being on the internet or something?

it's so that you can be on 2 networks at once

in a server environment, it would known as redundancy

Like Harrison was trying to get at, you could use it for windows ICS(internet connection sharing, using the pc as a psuedo router)

if you have a fancy switch, you could in theory do some trunking and double your normal bandwidth

You could do load balancing and get DSL and Cable and plug into each nic

99/100 they're useless for a home environment

If both ports are from the same manufacturer, you may be able to "team" the nics for failover or to double your throughput. We use this all the time in server environments on exchange servers, backup servers etc that saturate their single network connection. You will most likely see no speed benefit from it though considering you are probably limited to at most a 7Mbit connection via cable and we are talking at least 100Mbit and probably 1000Mbit connections on your PC.

In short, pick a NIC to use and disable the other one.

Thanks for the help. So far, I've only been using one, but I've noticed that I get logged out randomly from IM so I thought maybe the comptuer was expecting to have multiple connections. I'll disable the 2nd NIC. Thanks again.

Menlaan wrote:Thanks for the help. So far, I've only been using one, but I've noticed that I get logged out randomly from IM so I thought maybe the comptuer was expecting to have multiple connections. I'll disable the 2nd NIC. Thanks again.

the random logout is generally a tcp timeout issue


do you have a router?

I do, but I've never had problems from my other PCs. I don't know if it's related, but I also can't VPN to work from that computer while I can from my other computers.