kahunaburger

The computer in the kitchen controls the music in the house. It has iTunes installed and connects over the network to an Airport Express unit in the living room. The music files themselves are located on a media server that sits in my office – yep, I know it’s complicated. Ripping a CD or adding new music takes a while, because the computer in the kitchen needs to send the bytes over the (wired) network to the media server. And that wired connection was a standard 100 Mbps connection where you can send a maximum of 10 MB/sec. “Was” is the important part in the previous sentence.

I was always worried the wiring in my home would not be good enough for a Gigabit network. Colleagues have told me of horror stories when they tried to upgrade their home networks to support Gigabit Ethernet. I finally gave it a try on Friday and everything worked just fine. Now every wired network socket in my home offers 10/100/1000 Mbps, depending on what device you plug in. I purchased three 8-port Gigabit Netgear Switches from Newegg at a ridiculous price and they have been placed at strategic positions throughout the house.

Home network operations are ten times faster than before and I like it … (partial screenshot above shows the status of the network interface on this computer).