Anyone on here played Mechwarrior 3 over LAN before? I'm yet to try it since my computer was a bitch at the last lan I held, but my mate assures me that it's killer when 20 mechs are running around.
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hehe my friends and i have a long history of lanning, we played a lot of mech 3 a few years ago when it came out, much much fun!

also a few years before that we played a lot of mech 2 on the lan! hehe personally i always prefered mech 2 in some ways

i know this is probably a stupid question but i have 3 computers i want to set up in a lan whats the cheapest i could do it for and whats needed
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as a shadow is seen and not heard i am here
-Waddy the phoenix

basically all computers will need a network card

if second hand is ok they are about $10 a pop or less (PCI 10/100)
and you want a hub a second hand 10 base hub is about $10
havent seen many second hand hundred base hubs but that should be < $30
new 5 port 100 base switch is about $50 give or take.

then you will need cat-5 cable to run between them all.
figure on around $10 for a 10 meter cable (or so)

note your probbly best off getting all this stuff at a market like north rocks.
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Mechanical engineers build weapons, civil engineers build targets

3 x 10/100 LAN Adaptors and a 4 Port 10/100 Switch will get you rockin
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btw check existing computers
many new ones have lan built onto the motherboard
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Mechanical engineers build weapons, civil engineers build targets

ok fair enough so it will cost me < 100 then cool but i just realised something there is 0 need to set up a network cause chrisine is getting a wireless broard band connection from some mob (not unwired) and yeah so she is getting all that so its cool
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as a shadow is seen and not heard i am here
-Waddy the phoenix

you still need to network them if you want to have more than one online at a time
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Mechanical engineers build weapons, civil engineers build targets

And please don't forget some firewall software!!! If you are going to be hooked up to the internet and networking around the home, its totally essential. The average time between connecting an unprotected PC to the internet and getting hacked is down to about 20 minutes now.

The firewall built in to Windoz XP service pack 2 is OKish, but a commerial product will do better. There are several good products for free and I can send you some links to good security sites that tell you everything you need to know.

The second thing to do is to go to Microsoft's site and download all the latest patches.
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i have heard pretty bad things about the new patches for XP..
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Yeah, SP 2 is almost like a whole new version of Windows. It's a mixed bag - some people have huge problems while others (like me and all our work PCs) have none.

One of the worst problems is when your PC already has a security problem with a trojan or some spyware. SP2 usually fails and can toast your computer in this situation. There are plenty of helpful and unbiased sites out there with how-to articuleas if you Google for them.
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Australian 2015 Featherweight champion
UK 2016 Gladiator champion

k well sp2 is on this with no problems and the wireless connection comes intergrated with networking cards or some crap
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as a shadow is seen and not heard i am here
-Waddy the phoenix

I have just got an ADSL modem and currently have it plugged into my USB port as the LAN cable is in my ethernet port. The set up guide recomended using the ethernet port for the modem. Is this faster? Should I get a hub so that I can still LAN and have the ADSL modem connected to an ethernet port? Thanks.
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So even the rain that falls isn't actually going to fill our dams and our river systems

It depends on how you are going to use your machine and how secure you want it to be.. Normally its better to keep network traffic on a real (non USB) network-port. - Those USB-to-Network/Modem adaptors are handy, but they do occasionally give some more configuration trouble than a normal ethernet port does.

The best and reccomended way is get a "router" which is like a 4port hub, but also has an inbuilt hardware firewall, internet connection sharing facilities, possibly wireless network access, voice-over-ip phone calls and all sorts of other goodies built into the one box.

just plugging a cable or dsl modem into a normal hub is not reccomended since it means each computer has to have the security on its network port set very high (to protect it from the all the nasty hacks and worms floating about on the net),

That also then makes getting the computers to talk to each other difficult, since they have no easy way of distinguishing what data coming in their ethernet port is from a "safe to talk to" machine on their local network, vs what "please give me this password file" requests are coming from some twit out on the 'net

A router solves this problem by interposing itself "between" the internet and the local network, allowing the computers on the "back" side of the router to be friendly and talk to each other freely (via the inbuilt hub/switch), but acts as a "door bitch" to any traffic coming in or going out to the internet.

----------------------------------------------------------/Local Computers
[Internet] <----> [Modem] <-> [Router] <-----< Local Computers
----------------------------------------------------------\Local Computers

I set these things up for people all the time, and highly reccomend the "Draytek" routers.. Heres a good example of one that sounds like it would be suitable for you. http://www.draytek.com.au/products/Vigor2100V.php - They're about $200 (I think).

The Drayteks have a lot of extra features that are well worth the extra few $ if you like to push the edge . I just got the Q.O.S. (Quality of Service) feature setup and running on my draytek router and its great. I can leave downloads and uploads and Bit Torrent traffic running at full speed on one machine, but my web-browsing doesnt slow down at all on the others since the router "prioritises" the different types of traffic and automatically slows down the downloads temporarily to "make room" for the web-surfing traffic.. stuff like that makes them the best IMO

There are lots of other good brands as well at cheaper prices ($80-$140) without all the bells and whistles.. (LinkSys, NetGear, Netcomm). D-Link are good too, but I've found their wireless stuff only works well if its D-Link equipment on both ends.. so avoid them for wireless applications, The others seem to "interoperate" better..

One advantage of your present USB interface is that the computer sees it as a seperate network interface to the local ethernet port, so you can have it secured tightly, withut affecting the ability of your LAN port to talk to your local computers easily.

If you decide you dont want all the extra functionality of a router (secure internet access on all the pc's on the network), then I'd probably leave it the way it is if it works. just make sure you have the USB-Net port Firewalled. If you like to have multi machines running and want them to talk to each other without fighting with a firewall, definitely go for a router of some sort.
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The computers wont talk to eachother since the modem was installed. It had to change the IP.

I would like to use VoIP to save on long distance calls. What would I need to buy other than the DrayTek to use VoIP?

Would I need internet security on both computers with a router. I currently hook up to the net on one computer and run Norton in it. I have let the Norton subscription lapse in the second computer.

Thanks
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So even the rain that falls isn't actually going to fill our dams and our river systems