Looking for some expert advice here if possible.

1. I've just tried to put a new XP Home PC on my home network using a 15m Cat 6 cable mainly because I couldn't get hold of any Cat 5e cable long enough in the time I had. The cable connects to the network via an ADSL router/modem and when I connect it to the pc it tells me that a limited or no network connection was available. After rebooting it says that a network cable is unplugged. I then borrowed another PC's Cat 5e cable and it worked right away. Reading the info on the cable packaging I thought that the main difference was that Cat 6 was capable of faster speeds than Cat 5e however I could not get the local area connection to work no matter what. Is it worth replacing the Cat 6 with Cat 5e or is there some way of getting it to work?

2. If I go for some new CAT 5e cable where's the best place in the Sheffield area (apart from on-line) to get quality Cat 5e cable for the best price, either already made up or DIY.

3. On a slightly different note; once I had network connectivity with the new PC, I couldn't connect to or from it on the workgroup despite turning off firewalls etc. I could ping to and from it though. All PC's are running XP Home, the new PC is on Service Pack 2 and the others are still on SP1. Are there any default SP2 settings I could be missing which could be causing this problem?

A bit long winded I know but thought it best to try and explain it in some detail :)

I've got a really really really long Cat 5E cable, I paid about £8 for it from a computer shop at Fir Vale? The bottom of Northern General Hospital...someone will correct me if it's the wrong area :)

Oh and that was already made up

Yes, the NGH is in Herries Road, which is in the district of Fir Vale, and the electoral ward division of Burngrave, and the parliamentry constituency of Brightside with the postcode of S5 4** (god, I need to get out more!)

;)


Yes, cat 6 is a follow-up of cat5e

As kentboy119 said, CAT 6 is a modernisation of Cat 5E......but.....in my opinion has not proved its worth yet. Cat 5E worked fine and was very robust where as Cat 6 works a bit better but tends to be extremely tempremetal unless fitted by a professional and fitted well (things like bend radius etc.....boring stuf!)

If your looking for just a long patch lead for your PC then head down to the place recommended in earlier posts but if you want a proper cable network installed then look on Yell.com for a company called Digital Exchange here in Sheff, they are really good. They also do PC's and Telephone systems.

Problems solved after a day of trial and error! Switched the Cat 5e cable to the new pc and the Cat 6 cable to the other upstairs pc. Both worked fine though not sure why the Cat 6 cable didn't work on the new pc, maybe the network card didn't like it?

Solved the workgroup problem by switching off the Norton firewall (normally use Zone Alarm) that was installed by default although I thought I had disabled Norton Security when I was trying to sort it yesterday :confused: