10/100Base T ethernet and firewire

[docbell41]

i bought a new computer and it has a ethernet card and a firewire icon in the system tray are they related

[ixl]

I don't really understand what you are trying to figure out, but they probably aren't related. Ethernet is a networking protocol and Firewire is a high-speed serial interface primarirly used for multimedia devices.

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Charles M. Kozierok
Webslave, The PC Guide (http://www.PCGuide.com)
Comprehensive PC Reference, Troubleshooting, Optimization and Buyer's Guides...
Note: Please reply to my forum postings here on the forums. Thanks.

[docbell41]

i have seen firewire products advertised and as all this is still very new to me i was not sure if they required installing special firewire ports or if they could be used with something allready installed on my system especially since the firewire icon was in my system tray.
p.s. after having to do a reformat and recovery the firewire icon went away and hasnt been seen since.

[ixl]

The firewire icon was probably something created by custom software that came with your PC. It's impossible to say much more without knowing the particulars of what you are trying to do there.

------------------
Charles M. Kozierok
Webslave, The PC Guide (http://www.PCGuide.com)
Comprehensive PC Reference, Troubleshooting, Optimization and Buyer's Guides...
Note: Please reply to my forum postings here on the forums. Thanks.

[Egon101]

I guess you are asking what is ethernet and what is firewire. Ethernet is that big phone jack looking think in the back of your computer. That is used to connect your computer to a network, like other computers, a cable modem, etc. It uses good old protocols like TCP/IP, and IPX and all that offical local area network crap.

Firewire is what USB wants to be. Firewire is used to connect devices to your computer, printers, CD-R, Hard drive, Video Camera, Scanner. It is a lot like SCSI and USB put together. USB runs at 12Mb/s and Firewire runs at 400Mb/s. Another cool thing about Firewire over USB is that Firewire devices can communicate without usage of a CPU. What that means is that like SCSI when you access a Firewire device it does not eat any extra CPU cycles, unlike USB or IDE. Unfortunatly Apple created Firewire and Intel is pushing USB so you can guess how well firewire is being accepted within the PC world, plus lets think USB uses up extra CPU cycles, Intel sells CPUs........