How does Win9x handle Broadband?

[j7n]

Why don't you setup a controlled network at home and check the speeds? From my experience transfer speed over the network may be bottlenecked by older hard drives on PCI bus, not so much the NIC.

[soporific]

the only thing i can add to the discussion that hasn't been mentioned is that in terms of Windows 98 and the internet, there's only purpose you simply cannot use a Windows 98 machine for and that is file sharing. Win98 may not be the best when it comes to serving up web pages but it does the job, just a little slower and clunkier than you'd like. But when it comes to communicating with multiple P2P clients Win98 can only do so many at a time and it can't keep up at all and you get all sorts of mini crashes and you may as well just forget it. Or upgrade to XP. Seriously, this was the trigger for me.

Edited February 15, 2008 by soporific

[BenoitRen]

dialup connections are as crap as using IE.

For downloading files, yes. For regular Internet surfing, no.

Even with broadband, things don't always go fast enough. Servers get slow at times.

[Chozo4]

But when it comes to communicating with multiple P2P clients Win98 can only do so many at a time and it can't keep up at all and you get all sorts of mini crashes and you may as well just forget it.

Might have been your Networking card drivers. I've personally had little to no issue with peer-to-peer connections. While ago I had 180 peer connections (over 200 adding in the seeds) at a time with almost 240kb/sec transfer. Had no issue whatsoever.

Was on an nvidia nforce 10/100/1000 networking controller.

Edited February 15, 2008 by Chozo4

[noguru]

the only thing i can add to the discussion that hasn't been mentioned is that in terms of Windows 98 and the internet, there's only purpose you simply cannot use a Windows 98 machine for and that is file sharing. Win98 may not be the best when it comes to serving up web pages but it does the job, just a little slower and clunkier than you'd like. But when it comes to communicating with multiple P2P clients Win98 can only do so many at a time and it can't keep up at all and you get all sorts of mini crashes and you may as well just forget it. Or upgrade to XP. Seriously, this was the trigger for me.

I have a 10Mb/s ADSL2 broadband (1 Mb/s up) and my torrents work ok on Win98. Problem is dat Win98 won't allow you more than 100 connections by default. For torrents you want more! To get more you'll need to do this:

Make a new string named "MaxConnections" with value >100 in:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\VxD\MSTCP

I have set mine at 250 and I told utorrent to use 200 maximum so I can still do some web-surfing while downloading. I need a very good torrent but I actually have seen downloads at >1MB/s:) (megabyte, not bit)

Running 3 torrents is no problem. More than that works too but is not recommended, same goes for XP.

What I don't like with fast internet and Win98 is the high processor usage. I do have a decent 3COM NIC with drivers that allow a low processor usage (meaning the NIC itself takes over to save CPU cycles). But it doesn't really want to work, I notice some difference but when the speed really goes up the system still becomes laggy. I searched this on the web but I can't find any usefull info on this. I have a tool called Cybertweak to tweak TCP/IP settings that claims that Win98 doesn't support it. But the 3COM Win98 driver does offer this option. Any info on this matter is more than welcome.

[Drugwash]

I've always used TZ Connection Booster and TCP Optimizer (in this particular order) for years. No need to change any value with the former, just click Next everytime. And with the latter, just set it to Extreme and Optimal.

eMule works fine here while minimized, with just a bit of lagging sometimes (also Windows clock runs behind even a couple hours when there's heavy traffic).

I've tried running FlashGet as torr3nt (since when is this word censored?!) client but that thing simply kills the machine. Just got a 400MHz CPU and it can't deliver all that it needs.

NIC is D-Link DFE-530TX+ (10/100Mb).

Edited March 4, 2008 by Drugwash

[herbalist]

I run Shareaza on both 98FE and SE, with no problems. Have had over 25 downloads running at once with no issues. That's with a 366mhz Celeron.

Rick

[MikeyHunt]

With Windows 98s limited resources, would there be a noticable difference between using an ethernet connected modem and a USB modem?

Having switched from ADSL to Ethernet about 6 months ago ..I experienced a much faster connection speed and responsiveness with Ethernet . My .02