I've been thinking about getting a second PC and using it for downloads only. I use Torrents alot and I keep having to pause the dowloads when I want to browse the internet or play games because Torrents eat my bandwith. I was only wanting a cheap PC and it would be used only for downloading. My thought was to netowrk it with my more powerful PC and then transfer downloads once they had been completed. My frind has a Celeron 1.8ghz with 14" monitor that would suit me as I would only need a small HDD and no optical drives or powerful graphics / Sound. I my broadband speed is 7mbps and I would want to retain this speed on the second PC. My questions were,

1) Would the Celeron 1.8ghz with 512mb ram be quick enough to download at 7mbps

2) Would I be better off with Windows Vista (what my other PC has), Windows XP or Linux?

3) My Router is in my Lounge and there is a single Cat5e running to my Study. How would I connect both PC's to the router and to each other?

Thanks in advance for your responses

To connect it you could buy a small switch for the study.

Just one problem though, if you have to stop downloads to browse, the the 2nd PC maybe won't help. Your internet connection is a bottleneck, and if it's maxed out, it's maxed out. The only thing you could try is limiting the download (and upload) speed in your bittorrent client (or whatever), or get a router that can traffic shape.

Splitting the bandwidth between two machines probably won't you any benefit over what you have now. As for the questions

1) Yup, you're not asking it to do much.

2) Stick with what you know - probably XP with that spec, Vista is too hungry

3) They'll be physically connected via the router. You'll just have to enable networking on the machines to your requirements, and the how-to will depend on what you go with.

Edit: beat me to it

Splitting the bandwidth between two machines probably won't you any benefit over what you have now. As for the questions

1) Yup, you're not asking it to do much.

2) Stick with what you know - probably XP with that spec, Vista is too hungry

3) They'll be physically connected via the router. You'll just have to enable networking on the machines to your requirements, and the how-to will depend on what you go with.

Edit: beat me to it

The current setup only allows for one LAN connection as the Study has only one Cat5e cable. I'd need to split this somehow to cope with 2 pc's. Would I need a 2 into 1 adapter or another router

To connect it you could buy a small switch for the study.

Just one problem though, if you have to stop downloads to browse, the the 2nd PC maybe won't help. Your internet connection is a bottleneck, and if it's maxed out, it's maxed out. The only thing you could try is limiting the download (and upload) speed in your bittorrent client (or whatever), or get a router that can traffic shape.

Thats the thing I can never understand with torrents. I can download a file at over 500kbps from a website (tried by download latest nvidia drivers at 99mb) amd still happily browse the internet. When I'm using utorrent to download, I get about 100kbps and my internet is sooooooo slow.

The current setup only allows for one LAN connection as the Study has only one Cat5e cable. I'd need to split this somehow to cope with 2 pc's. Would I need a 2 into 1 adapter or another router

You could use a cat5 splitter either end (they use spare pairs in the cable nnot used for 100M ethernet), but I'd just get a small hub/switch in the study.

Stick a switch in your study on the end of the single cat5 feed from the router. That will give the multiple connections in the study. However you will probably find that the torrent downloading/upload will saturate your connection. You have two options, limit it at the router (for a given IP address) if your router supports this, or limit the bandwidth used in your torrent client (such as uTorrent). uTorrent has a schedule too, so you could set it to abuse your connection when your at work/asleep, and then slow it down when your at home and want to browse the net.

phone line -> router (lounge) -> cat5 -> switch (study)

switch (study) -> pc 1

switch (study) -> pc 2

Thats the thing I can never understand with torrents. I can download a file at over 500kbps from a website (tried by download latest nvidia drivers at 99mb) amd still happily browse the internet. When I'm using utorrent to download, I get about 100kbps and my internet is sooooooo slow.

Because bittorrent shares with other people, it uses your upload bamdwidth as well. As virtully all home connections are asymetric (that's the A in ADSL), the upload gets choked. When it gets choked, the acknowledement packets you PC sends everytime you receive a packet can't get through, so things get resent, and it all grinds to a halt.

When you download from a website, you receive a lot of data, but only send ACKnowledgement data, so the upload channel stays clear, and the download doesn't get resent.

Thats the thing I can never understand with torrents. I can download a file at over 500kbps from a website (tried by download latest nvidia drivers at 99mb) amd still happily browse the internet. When I'm using utorrent to download, I get about 100kbps and my internet is sooooooo slow.

additional session management can cripple a crap router. Also what a/w are you running? ESET Smart Security is known to kill browsing speeds when torrenting, but there is a cure. I use ESET so I know :-)

It'll be a RAM/paging issue along with ISP speed. Also the other end will have a bearing on speeds, as well as the number of peers

A new PC wont cure ISP speed, and checking torrent app settings and some cleaning up of your PC will help out.

You can use QOS settings on some routers to control the bandwidth available to certain PC's. Most torrent clients also have a global up and down limit setting. I know many of the Linux bittorent clients have a web client control page, so you can control the downloads from another PC on the network without going to that computer. Transmission also has the ability to change the upload and download speed during certain times of the day. I guess some of the Windows ones will too. If you're up for the challenge I'd try do linux on the second PC. One way of connecting to it would be using VNC, which makes it almost as if you're sat at the other computer on the computer you're using.

I have a torrent client I can run on my Infrant Ready NAS, but it seems to be very slow with its download cf my PC, even though I have opened up the appropriate ports for it on my router. On win XP, you could just use remote desktop :-) but that requires a second windows license, linux is free.....

uTorrent on my PC is only taking 9208K, and it is working quite hard :-) where as bloated MSN Messenger is taking the best part of a 100MB!

Just have this 2nd box trickling through during the day, then let it rip over night?

I've got an old laptop doing this (also provides me with email and access to other restricted sites at work!), I've only got a 1Mbit connection, so during the day it's locked to 10kb/s, then from midnight to 6am it's wide open.

Using uTorrent, by the way

The current setup only allows for one LAN connection as the Study has only one Cat5e cable. I'd need to split this somehow to cope with 2 pc's. Would I need a 2 into 1 adapter or another router

Take your single cat5 port and split it.

100Mbits only needs 2 of the 4 pairs, so if you know what you're doing you can run 2 100MBit links down a single Cat5 cable.