Question : Question on NIC's speed and duplex

I have set up 3 Dell computers on a wired network through a Linksys DSL router. Two of them are about 50 feet away from the router and the third one is next to it. I have no problem with the third computer, goes on-line fine with 100 Mbps NIC speed. The other two computers, I was able to make them get IP addresses from the router after setting the NIC's speed and duplex to 10 Mbps full. When set at default (Auto) they gave unpredicted results. Typing IPCONFIG will give either 0.0.0.0 or IP addresses that didn't start with 192.168.1.x. When I set up one of these computers next to the router, then it works fine like the third computer. Do I have problem with weak signal? Could this problem be fixed by connecting them to a switch/hub from the router?

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Answer : Question on NIC's speed and duplex

>>Are the ends on your cables hand-crimped, or did you buy machine-crimped cables?

>I hand-crimped them my self

Bingo.  You cannot trust hand-crimped cables, period.  I wish they would stop selling male RJ-45 ends - it implies that cables can be hand-crimped well, which is just not the case.

Case in point - I used to work for an ISP - we had intermittent troubles all over our network - finally, we got management to buy a decent cable tester and had one of the junior techs run through every single cable - 80% of our hand-crimped cables turned up bad in some respect, according to the cable tester(and how much you wiggled the cable).  We naver had to hand-crimp anopther cable again, since management allocated $$ for enough cables to replace all our hand-crimped runs, and quite a few extra to boot.

My suggestion - go out and buy one factory-crimped 50ft cable.  If that works (and I'm sure it will), you can then justify buying the second one.

Cheers,
-Jon