The Cult of the Cool Mac: Made with 100% USDA real meat!

It never hurts to use a high quality cable.

Gigabit-certified ethernet cables that meet CAT-5E and CAT-6 certifications can cost significantly more than ordinary Fast Ethernet cables. The cheaper cables are usually certified to work with up to 100Mbps networks, so unless you are connecting two computers with Gigabit Ethernet, the better cables won't give you any speed advantage.

That's the theory.

But I discovered today that I can double my throughput between two Macs connecting at 100Mbps if I use a high-quality crossover cable. My regular Fast Ethernet cable turned out to be slowing me down.

Even though my home-network goes through a 10/100 switch and the LED's on the switch indicate a full-speed connection, I'm getting nowhere near 100Mbps right now. I'm going to upgrade my ethernet cables and we'll see if that speeds things up.

Watch this space for the results of the experiment!