How about my computer?

The dirty little secret of gigabit Ethernet is that if you're running Win98 or 98SE, you probably won't get any benefit from your investment in gigabit gear. Although there are some registry edits that you can try to improve your throughput, you probably won't see much improvement over the network performance you're getting now with 10/100 equipment.

The problem is that the TCP/IP "stack" in Win98 really wasn't designed with such high speed networking technology in mind, and has a hard time using a 100Base-T connection at its full potential, let alone a gigabit link! I'll have more on this topic in Part 2 of this NTK, but in the meantime, consider Win2000 and WinXP as the only serious Windows OSes to use for gigabit LANs.

I don't mean to imply by the last sentence that Win2000 and XP are the only OSes that will properly support gigabit adapters. I have to plead ignorance of the performance of other OSes, so hold off on the nasty emails, please!

If you think you'll have to ditch ol' faithful and buy a shiny new computer to make the jump to gigabit Ethernet, the answer is a firm "maybe". Citing a rough rule of thumb of 1Hz of "modern" processor speed for each bit per second (bps) of TCP/IP network traffic, a manufacturer of gigabit networking gear told me that any machine running at a processor speed of below 700MHz or so would have a hard time keeping a gigabit pipe full. That's not to say that with the right OS, an older machine wouldn't get any improvement from a gigabit connection. You just might see speeds in the 100-500Mbps range vs. anything approaching a full gigabit.