Elly,
I always ask people not to direct questions to me personally, simply cause this forum is not a portal between the site's visitors and myself. There are many people who can help answer your question, and directing it towards and individual might mean that you might get one or no answer at all. Please keep it in mind for your future posts [img]images/smiles/icon_smile.gif[/img]
So you have a total of 20 PC's, of which 15 are used for gaming and 5 have a dial up connection to the Internet and you want all 20 to be able to access the Internet.
There are quite a few solutions in your case, each one with its good and bad points.
Firstly, you should look into replacing the 5 dialups with a possible 64 or even better, 128kb isdn connection. Im sure the cost will be pretty much the same, if not slightly cheaper and would definatily increase your total available bandwidth. One 64K ISDN connection is in practice slightly faster than two 56K dialup connections. Reason is because the 56K dialups rearly connect at speeds faster than 40-42Kbits and in practice, you will never get more than 4-4,5 kb/sec, while with one 64k digital isdn, you can expect average speeds of around 7,5 k/b sec.
If isdn is not a choice and you wish to stick to PSTN dialup, then look towards a webramp. These devices allow multiple dialups and aggregate the bandwidth so your sharing the dialup connections amongst all machines that use them. You can also set a threshold level so once the traffic reaches a particular level, a new dialup is initiated.
There are quite a few webramp-alike products in the market and their prices are acceptable.
If you don't plan on buying any new equipment and want to find a solution using what you have, then that too is possible, but it will definately be a 'patch job' and not take care of the real problem correctly.
The fastest way to get your 15 gaming pcs online would be to enable Internet Sharing on your dialup computers and point your gaming pcs to them. In this case though, you will need to share the 5 dialups amongst the 15 additional pcs...so you could configure 3 pcs at a time to use a specific dialup pc as its gateway. As I said, this 'quick fix' method is really lame and will only do temporarily until you decide to implement a better method, like one of the above I mentioned previously.
Anyone else have any thoughts on this problem?
Cheers,
