Most modern high-end motherboards have two RJ-45 Jacks which support a dual LAN feature. Is it possible to connect 2 different internet connections, (e.g. Cable + DSL) to boost internet speeds? In other words, can the network controller handle segmenting and packets from 2 different IPs.
Do you have both Cable and ADSL? I'm pretty sure the answer is no..... Your NIC's need to be on the same subnet, and they can only have 1 gateway which = one I.P. address afaik. FW could prob tell you for sure.
The easy answer, no.. you cannot. You would need to get a load balancing router (not entirely cheap) in order to do this. On a side note, each nic is it's own entity, it handle's whatever it's own ip is doing, not others. Also, nic's can have multiple ip address assigned to them but that is nothing a "normal" home user will ever even come close to needing.
There's really not much the average homeuser could do with them. The only thing I could think of is load balancing and failover. Unless you're running a server where lots of load and the possibility of failover are potential problems then it's useless. Nvidia did have the option of teaming, making both act as one internet connection under one IP giving you a theoretical 2Gbps but that feature was removed in later chipset drivers.
This depends on where you live. For example, if you have very limited volume (like only 5 GB / month or so) on your expensive international internet connection but not on your cheap local one then it makes perfect sense to use both at the same time.
It's not something I've heard of before...wouldn't be any good for dowloading because the NIC's don't work together like that.. And how would you be able to have more than one gateway from the same computer?
Multiple GWs are only for redundancy, TBH for a home user multi-nic setups are not really going to give you much. But if you want to play.... 1. You can your own router/firewall/proxy using a PC. Nice learning exercise..... So you have 1 Nic for Internal and one for External (LAN/WAN) and set the PC up to do routing. I've only ever done this on Win Server, but there are lots of linux tools for this too. 2. Do some NIC teaming, great fun especially when VMs are involved..... get yourself HyperV Server 2008 R2.... let me know if you get it to work reliabley
Step 1: Open regedit and go to Code: [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\NetBT\Parameters] Add the valuename RandomAdapter if it does not exsist, make sure you add it as a REG_DWORD (DWORD Value). Enter 1 as a value data to enable RandomAdapter or 0 to disable it. Step 2: Add the valuename SingleResponse if it does not exsist, make sure you add it as a REG_DWORD (DWORD Value). Enter 1 as a value data to enable SingleResponse or 0 to disable it. Step 3: Reboot your computer. Note: Make sure both RandomAdapter and SingleResponse have the data value 1 or the load balancing will not work. Step 4: Configure both your network adapters as described here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/258487/EN-US/ Note: Although I haven't tested this myself I think both network adapters will become primary adapters (instead of one primary and one backup adapter) if you enter 1 as a metric value on both adapters. Should you decide to try this, please let me know if it works because I cannot guarantee anything. EDIT: Adding the above registry values should enable Network Load Balancing (NLB) on Windows 7 but again, I haven't tested it myself so you're at your own risk.