Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler Networking educational site?

I'm not seeing an answer to this on About.com or Googling:

Is a 100' Cat5 cable problematic pertaining to signal loss? Is Cat6 better for long runs?

Cat6 is always better, but I don't think 100' is a problem for Cat5. I'm sure there's a spec somewhere.

It looks like lengths of up to 100m (328 feet) are in the specs.

Cool! I've got a 100' length, four 7' lengths and one 14' length of Cat6 in my basket at Monoprice. I'll pick up the switcher locally as I have a BB Reward certificate.

Maybe Sean will pick up and deliver the cables?

Well, everything is mostly good with the network, though I need to iron out some security issues. In the meantime, I have a question that I can't find an answer to:

Is there a way to stop a Vista computer from EVER going on the internet?

I have a laptop tethered to my studio camera that I use for recording images, and now that I've got the network setup, it's constantly slowed down and interupted by "new updates available", etc. I know I can turn off the auto-updates (at least I did in XP Pro) and remove stuff from the startup group, but I can't find a simple option to "Never connect to the internet" or better yet "Never connect to a wireless network". When I boot up, I manually disconnect it from the wireless network, but it's already found updates in the meantime!

I can always hardwire it occasionally to update it as needed.

Is there such an option, or is MS hellbent on everything having to be connected at all times?

Turn off your wireless card.

Via hardware management?

I have another laptop with an PCMCIA wireless card, so I can simply pull it out on that laptop. But I wasn't so sure that turning something off via the hardware management would be a good idea for this one...

Do you still need it on your home network? If not, I see nothing wrong with disabling your network hardware, occasionally enabling it for updates.

No, I'd actually prefer it to be disconnected from everything. I can bring it up to my office to hardwire it with an ethernet cable here and there as needed.

Well, you can either do it with a switch on the laptop (if such a switch exists), or you can drill down through Vista's network apps until you get to the adapters and simply disable the wireless adapter (right click on the adapter, choose disable)