In my network connections I have one called 1394. What is that for???

Question

In my network connections I have one called 1394. What is that for???

Answer 1

A 1394 Net Adaptor Connection is basically Win2k/XP's way of telling you that you have a Firewire interface installed in your system.

IEEE 1394 is more commonly known as Firewire and is mostly used to connect to peripherals such as digital cameras, camcorders and some external hard drives. It can also be used to network two Firewire-equipped systems together, achieving 12.5 to 50MBps transfer speeds. Firewire networking use is limited because of its 15ft cable length limitation.

Answer 2

1394 refers to a firewire port.

Answer 3

If your computer is running Windows XP (or Me or Windows Server 2003 for that matter, but not Vista) and has a Firewire port, you'll probably find the 1394 Net Adapter installed on it — you can check your system by going to Start, click on My Network Places and then choosing View network connections. Built-in Firewire ports have been pretty common on systems for the past few years, and although it's most commonly referred to as FireWire — Sony calls it i.LINK on its systems — the interface's official name is actually IEEE 1394.

A Different Kind of Network

If you're not familiar with it, Firewire/1394 is a high-speed serial connection that's commonly used in consumer electronics. On the PC, Firewire ports are typically used to connect to external storage (hard drives) and multimedia devices like digital camcorders, but if you're running one of the Windows versions mentioned above, you can also run TCP/IP over Firewire and use it to network two systems together.

So why would you want to use Firewire instead of Ethernet to network computers? Well, normally there wouldn't be a reason to, but because standard Firewire supports speeds four times greater than Fast Ethernet — 400 Mbps compared to 100 Mbps — using Firewire could be advantageous if you need to move large amounts of data between two computers as quickly as possible (say, to transfer data files from an old system to a new one).

All you need to network two systems with Firewire is a standard Firewire cable, the same kind that's used with Firewire peripherals. You do need to ensure the cable's connectors matches those on the systems you want to link — desktop systems typically use a 6-pin rectangular connector, while notebooks typically use a more compact 4-pin square connector. Even if you've never used your Firewire ports before, the 1394 Net Adapter connection in Windows is enabled by default, so once you've plugged the cable into their respective systems, they should be able to communicate.