Tuesday, September 28th, 2004Tuesday, September 28th, 2004

Windows Could Benefit From Mac Networking

While sitting in the airport yesterday, I wanted to transfer a 800MB file from my laptop (a Titanium Powerbook) to my girlfriend's iBook. Her computer is newer than mine, so she was running 54Mbit wireless, while mine was 11Mbit. So I setup a private computer-to-computer network (no biggie).

But here's the part I thought was cool... it was going to take like 15 minutes to transfer the file because we were limited to the 11Mbit and I didn't want to wait that long. I had an ethernet cable with me, so I plugged it into both computers just to see if Macs could automatically switch a normal Ethernet cable to a cross-over cable (I figured it was a long shot).

Low and behold, not only did the laptop internally switch it to a crossover cable, but the file copy that was going on automatically switched to the Ethernet cable the second it was plugged in. By the time I could check to see if the computers could see each other via Ethernet, the original file copy that was going on via Airport was all of a sudden done. Either way, pretty slick that it switched a file copy to a different (faster) port automatically mid-copy.

2 Responses to “Windows Could Benefit From Mac Networking”

  1. Vicious Summer Says:

    Damn! That is cool! Macintosh is so much better then IBM. By the way, you should get a new laptop and I’ll buy that crappy old titanium off of you ;) .

  2. Foxy Says:

    Mmmm…that is impressive….I must admit that I use firewire for backups a lot and there is something somewhere about firewire doing the same as ethernet….there is a beta out if I remember rightly on ADC

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