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Ethernet over a USB 1.1 port via adapter - speed?

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First post, by bmwsvsu

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So today I received some Pentium 3 motherboards I recently purchased, and one thing I guess I completely overlooked is the lack of onboard ethernet. There's a phone jack but no ethernet. And there's only 2 PCI slots, which will be filled with a sound and a video card, so I have no other room for expansion. So I'm thinking my only option here for an ethernet connection is a USB solution.

Considering it has an Intel 810 chipset, I'm assuming that the USB specification is 1.1.

Considering the theoretical max speed is 12mbps, what kind of speed could I realistically expect using some kind of ethernet to USB adapter? And does anybody out there have any experience using such an adapter?

Reply 1 of 3, by Auzner

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Go for it. That's like a 10X CD-ROM, so better than nothing. The trick is finding one with drivers for your OS. Win9X I remember it not being an automatic device class driver.

Reply 2 of 3, by bmwsvsu

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I found some really cheap unbranded ones on ebay. ASIX dm9601 chip. Never heard of ASIX before, but these apparently have Windows 98 support. For just $4 I'll give one a try.

Reply 3 of 3, by dionb

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I work for an ISP and we used to ship them in the days that Ethernet was less common than USB. If you could get the driver to work they were reliable enough, but slow. Didn't matter in those days as 4Mbps was "superfast broadband", and 4Mbps was about the max you could realistically expect. These of course became an issue later as we ramped speeds up past 10Mbps and still had legacy customers on them...

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