The Official PC building thread - 4th Edition

A modem has nothing to do with internal network transfer speeds, routers do and he already has that. If the original poster has internet service that can choke a standard modem with 100+Mb speeds, my bet is that its delivered through fiber and we are talking about a different kind of setup altogether. Some modem/router combinations have gigabit ports, but that's the router half using them on the internal network, not download speed from ISP.

 

Mine does Modem/router.

 

and I bet the router half (1000Mb) wishes that the modem half (probably <5Mb) could download faster and put it to good use. ;p

 

It's important to realise that router throughput speed is not the same as the switch speed in the router.

e.g. the maximum throughput of a Linksys WRT54GL is about 45Mbps despite being a 100Mbps port router. Likewise, most gigabit routers top out between 80Mbps and 350Mbps. You can't use consumer-grade equipment to route gigabit and get gigabit speeds out the other end, too much processing power is required.
The WRT54GL I had was perfectly stable and had custom firmware on it I've still not seen bettered (Tomato) but unfortunately once I upgraded from 40Mbps FTTC (38 in practice) to 80Mbps (65 in practice) it fell flat, and had to be upgraded.

 

Cant argue a thing you said Sam, but I can interject that you are still talking routing speeds, not modems. I guess we would all need to know what kind of internet service is being provided, I realize not everyone lives in slow USA, so speeds fast enough to warrant such a modem isn't out of the question. No one over over here really will give you those speeds through coaxial to need it though, such speeds come with T1 or fiber and that comes with different hardware requirements.

 

Well indeed, for connections under 30Mbps or so, which I understand is a great deal of the USA (and it's still a fair proportion of this country too, I am quite fortunate to receive the service I do here), you can use almost any old router.

What's commonly done to avoid the router slowing down internal network traffic (and indeed, standard practice for any business) is to use a separate switch for internal data, and leave the router out of the equation other than providing internet connectivity to said switch.

 

One of the better cable modems allows the following speeds but you are always limited to what your provider is going to give you and they state that in their spec as well.

ARRIS / Motorola SURFboard Gateway SBG6580 DOCSIS 3.0 Wireless N Cable Modem
* Internet download speeds up to 343 Mbps and upload speeds up to 131 Mbps based on your Cable provider service.

So you get 1/3rd Gigabit speeds at best.

 

My connection is ~30Mb, in practice around 28-32 depending on time of day. Burst speeds of up to 60Mb at the beginning of a download, meant to make small downloads much quicker. No bottlenecks or issues here with a very basic router.

Also, continuing to fall deeper and deeper in like with my PC Lots of OCing experimentation and benchmarking/testing shows some nice improvements. Continues to excel for my needs. Should have upgraded the video a while ago. Poor 1090T was being choked

 

I have router up and running dd-wrt(build23204), home network functional through built-in OpenVPN. Router sees my IPaddress from provider, but all my home devices are under a totally different network. I've had to do a few tweaks because torrent traffic + VPN encryption = the router pegs its CPU load and it has dropped its WAN connection a few times. I was able to lower the amount of active connections to keep it from working so hard and i've had better results, but after only 1 day i dont have full faith yet. If i had the process to do over again, I'd have found a router with a better CPU than the 600Mhz Broadcom chip that comes in these to help crunch the encryption better. But its only been one day, gotta wait and see what kind of uptime i get.
Time to "stress test" more by pushing large files through it...
EDIT:the original Asus firmware was feature-rich and had a good GUI.

 

This is going to be completely off-topic so feel free to shout at me!

I'm in the midst of looking in to how I can "easily" use an Excel spreadsheet as a backend of sorts, to pull data and display it online.

Code:

$fieldTitle

Name: $field-pulledfromExcel
DOB: $field-pulledfromExcel

And so on..

I know this can be achieved using PHP but my knowledge here is limited so I'm stuck as my Excel files have 40 sheets or so.

- It doesn't need to be dynamic, merely static, as the data is updated every 4-6 months anyway
- I do not want to embed Excel in an iFrame or anything archaic like that
- I'm not interested in setting MySQL, etc unless the conversion between Excel and that is a lot more simple than I believe it to be

Obviously Excel is a bit of a dinosaur for this sort of task but I never set out to do this; we use Excel for its intended purpose, storing data, charts, etc and I'm toying with the aforementioned idea.

Does anyone have any experience with this sort of thing and care to weigh in? Back to Google anyway. Thanks if so.

 

You can do it with Excel you'll just have to callout file/sheet/cell in your lookup but it will be dangerous if you ever change file names/sheet names/cell data so why not convert your spread into Access and use the database instead?

I make all sorts of complicated spread sheets and a lot of the time it would have been much easier just to setup a database and use Excel to reference it but I always think it will be simpler and easier to just make a spread.

Here is one way to go at it but not the way I was thinking:

How to query and display excel data by using ASP.NET, ADO.NET, and Visual C# .NET

This is the opposite direction:

Using Excel Web Queries to Retrieve Data

This is a Google approach but might give you an idea:

Google Spreadsheets

How to display data in Excel spreadsheet from MySQL

How to Create Excel Dynamic Web Query

Excel Web Query Secrets Revealed

There is more out there but this may give you something to start with.

 

Thanks, appreciate the links. Yeah, I'm not sure writing loads of individual calls that I can easily bork when I decide to re-format the spreadsheet for some unknown reason is how I want to spend my time!

Tried importing my sheet into Google just for a laugh - oops!

I think the best way would just be to do this properly - as and when I actually need to - rather than try to quick-fix something just because I can.

 

Sounds about right, good call on that. I've mostly linked my spread to the web,other way around, to update cells in my spread i.e., for querying updated score for the NCAA 64 Tournament, but it can cause me a headache when the web formatting or URL changes so I do my seeding and score updates manually now for that case.

I would have run into the same issue with most of my spreads plus I'm a power user so I typically use formatting and special features that programs like Google, LibreOffice, and Kingsoft Office Professional can't handle.

Even though Macro's can be great tools in Excel I typically steer clear of those too, as they can also cause you a headache as well.

Steve

 

Hope to get some good ideas about custom building PC.

 

yuriii, what do you want to do with it? Video editing, file storage, gaming?

Do you have a fixed budget?


Movies, care to explain in a nutshell what you guys are attempting to accomplish? I understand the basic gist of using spreadsheets and Access to reference data for another document. I work with databases on regular intervals, but usually nothing much more than data entry and basic navigation of Access. Am just curious as to what the intended objective is.

 

I've not much experience with implementing web queries but have used spreadsheets contained them and it strikes me as just as much of a pain for that reason alone.

I also don't tend to play with macros unless I have something simple I want to automate by using the macro recorder.

I wanted to host an Excel spreadsheet on a webserver as effectively a backend database. I would then use PHP or a-n-other language on my website to look up the relevant data from the Excel file and display it on the webpage.

 

Im no expert, only taken basic classes on windows visual/.net, scripting, web development, and databases. Im familiar with many things, expert on none but it seems like this is the exact kind of application you'd want a real SQLdatabase. And from what i remember, if you already have the right formatting in place on your excel, it isnt hard to transfer that into a proper database. i remember going from excel to access to SQL but dont remember taking files straight from excel to sql but im sure once the right formatting is in place its a breeze.

 

That would be true that you could convert it over to a database but there might be some glitches in doing so, however that is your best bet. And once you do so it will be easier to maintain so there are good reasons in going that route.

 

Yeah, I think that in the longer term I will migrate to Access and then be in a better position should setting up a web accessible db become necessary. Thanks for weighing in guys.

 

My only experience with anything similar is using systems set up by other professionals. At work we use a real-time web-based system for work orders and other things. Very easy for the boss to update it and just view current/pending projects on a smartphone from a worksite. I believe we use Access for our database, then import it into something a little more proprietary.