Network Card

Network card

Network cable and connectors

This is included because more and more people are networking two or more computers together and so a standard computer will come with a network card installed. These are inst5alled inside the system unit and all you have access to is the back panel to connect your network cable into.

A typical network card and cable is shown on the right. The network card is installed and hidden inside the system unit and you have access to the back panel where the connector is, this connector is known as an RJ45 connector, (a little different from the telephone connector which is an RJ11, it's a little smaller).

Depending on your set up, networking works in different ways.

If you have just one computer and you wish to conect it to the Internet you would obtain the hub (a device for connecting a number of computers together) and any other hardware or software from your Internet Service Provider (ISP). Now the hub would come with a cable to connect it to the telephone line and you would also use a cable (pictured right) to connect the hub to the computer network card so that you can send and receive data over the telephone line.

If you have more than one computer and wish to network them together on the Internet, take the above scenario and connect the network cards (pictured right) in each computer to the hub using a network cable (pictured right) so that each computer is connected to the hub and the Internet.

Now, if you have two network cards in each computer, you could have each one connected to the Internet as described above and also have each computer connected together by using network cables (pictured right) forming a little network and what is called a Local Area Network (LAN).

Itstarts to get a little more complicated from there so we'l stop at that and see a more in depth description of networks on the technical page accessed by clicking on the Information link button above.