One computer.. two "internets"

**joker_927** · November 12th, 2007, 10:25 PM

I have two ISP's right now. Comcast and my schools internet. Is it possible (I have two ethernet ports) to have both plugged into my computer, and have certain programs use one connection, and others use the other.

It seems like it should be easy, but also seems like something M$ wouldn't integrate this sort of thing into windows (XP). Any programs that could make this possible?

**quickoldcar** · November 12th, 2007, 10:48 PM

I tried something similar a while back.

My results were this:

2 seperate ethernet cards, cable ethernet, dsl ethernet, it was possible to connect them both as a bridge, but one always took over the other and could not get them to work together, which makes sense due to the information coming in is in fact different.

Whether there is a software out there or not to make use of the extra connection I do not know.

**RamonGTP** · November 12th, 2007, 10:52 PM

The only way you can really use both of them is to have a router that can take two WAN inputs and do load balancing. THe good part is that you get more bandwidth. The bad part is you have increased latency and routers that can do that are not cheap.

Another thing you can do is run Virtual PC and have it run off the 2nd ISP.

**joker_927** · November 12th, 2007, 11:27 PM

Originally Posted by RamonGTP

"Another thing you can do is run Virtual PC and have it run off the 2nd ISP."

omg, that is great idea!

Im using MS Virtual PC 2007 and I can't get it to access the network connection if its disabled on the physical PC. I can't enable the connection though because then windows gets pissed that two connection are enabled (IP isnt assigned correctly and no packets recieved.)

**RamonGTP** · November 13th, 2007, 12:03 AM

You should be able to enable both of them, just go into the advanced TCP/IP properties and disable "automatic metric" and put a number in there. The lower the number, the higher priority it has IIRC. So if you set one up with 10 and the other with 20, it should use the one with the 10 metric. Then on the VPC side, you can disable the one you aren't going to use. This is all my own little theory as I've never actually attempted it.

**joker_927** · November 13th, 2007, 01:36 AM

Ok got it to work, but none of the programs I want to use are. I was trying to install a program called DC++ and I tried a lot of variants and they all gave errors about some SHELL32.dll file. Oh well

Thanks for the internet help.