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I have 2 computers next to each other that both have wireless devices to connect to a wireless router/modem in the house.

But I want to have a wired connection between these computers using a crossover network cable.

Is it possible to have a crossover connection plus the wireless connections going at the same time?

I am using XP on both computers.

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  • Why are you wanting to do this? Are you trying to increase speed? Sep 23, 2010 at 1:39
  • @Kronos: to increase reliability for a program that uses a database on the other computer Sep 23, 2010 at 1:48

2 Answers 2

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By doing this, all that will happen is that file transfers from machine to machine will run a lot faster, however, if you only do the occasional transfer/print etc, there is very little reason to actually do this.

FYI - edit to be clearer.

If Wired is 100Mb and Wireless is 54Mb, you will be going at the wired 100Mb speed, not combined at 154Mb, it is not possible to team a wired and wireless card - sorry if this was not clear.

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  • How do I tell the computers to use the crossover cable and not the wireless network? Sep 23, 2010 at 1:55
  • Any wired connection will get a lower interface metric than wireless, if there is a valid route, it will take preference over a wireless network. Sep 23, 2010 at 1:57
  • @Wil ... How does this increase speed? I thought all it did was pick and chose between either the wired connection or the wireless and not utilize the two? Sep 23, 2010 at 1:58
  • @KronoS If wireless is 54Mb and Wired is 100Mb, the obviously it will send at 100Mb - not talking about using them together.... I can see how my answer may look, I will make it clearer. Sep 23, 2010 at 2:01
  • I agree with Wil... Just use the wired connection, there is not need for the wireless connection. Sep 23, 2010 at 2:05
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I do something similar at work. I have two servers with dual gigabit Ethernet cards. The network they are connected to is 10/100Mb. So I connected the second NIC of each computer to the other. This way when the two servers sync, they go over the gigabit connection, and aren't slowed down by the switch (and aren't loading the LAN connection the other machines want to use).

In my case I gave the connection between the servers a different network address than the rest of the LAN, and no default gateway.

After a few seconds, the computers realized that connection between the computers were faster than the 10/100 and weighted the metrics to have the gigabit connection preferred for communication to the other server.

I imagine in your case with wired and wireless it should be the same.

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