What is the purpose of having 2 network cards?
January 2nd, 2010 | 
Author: My computer came with 2. I get disconnected or booted off my network and all the other computers on the network seem to work fine. I’ve worked out that it may be because I have 2 network cards. I don’t remember ordering 2 so it might have just come with the system.
What do I do with 2? Should I just disable one or should I bridge them?
I’m a network engineer with 30 years of experience.
The simple thing for you to do is to simply disable one of them and just use one. using two or more is really an advanced thing to do but I’ll give you the basics.
**** 2 or more Network cards. *****
With two or more network cards, you can load ballance your traffic, so you in effect can have double the bandwidth of using just one, but this requires routing configurations, and OS configuration changes.
As someone else said, you can also use one as a LAN port and the other as a WAN port, effectivly using your computer as a proxy server on a network. your cable modem / DSL modem would connect to your wan port, then your computer to your internal local area network (LAN port). All other computers would then be using yours as a proxy server, or it could be configured as a router, DNS server, DHCP server, etc. etc. There are many things you can do in that configuration.
You can also use two NICs as a type of firewall. Remember that a firewall is a philosophy, not a product. Firewalls can be utilized by getting hardware , software, utilizing policies or best practices. In this case, you may have two LAN’s you connect to, and to keep them apart from each other you may be using TCP/IP on one NIC and be using IPX traffic on the other, exclusivly. As long as your machine is not forwarding traffic, you would have a basic firewall between the two, but still be able to access both of them.
I hope that helps
Posted in network booting
Maybe it would be useful to use one for your wireless internet and one for connecting to friend’s computers at your house for gaming? I am not sure. I would disable one until you want to use it again.
(My computer > network places > view connections > right click the one you want to disable (or enable at another time) and click disable)
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You should remove one. 2 cards is a waste and has no benefits. Take out one and save it if the other breaks or if you get a new pc
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1 card is for (Lan) local area network and 1 for (Wan) wide area network if your computer act as a server or domain
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Experience
i believe both mark and stephen are wrong.
You can do various things with 2 network cards in which is farely advanced so if you dont even no why you have 2 in ur comp disable one like mark sed, but i think u can use them to have 2 internet/network connections running to the same computer at the same time and you can use one as a wireless access point for another computer/thing.
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maybe u ordered 1 network card… and the motherboard came with a inbuilt network card.. its quite common.
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hello
your both NIC are working together if they are then disable your one NIC and then connect your service if u get same problem then we can discuss about it again thanks
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There could be two by accident in assembly. Assuming this is a desktop, just remove one.
If this is a laptop go into My Network Places, then view connections and disable one of them. Then reboot.
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I’m a network engineer with 30 years of experience.
The simple thing for you to do is to simply disable one of them and just use one. using two or more is really an advanced thing to do but I’ll give you the basics.
**** 2 or more Network cards. *****
With two or more network cards, you can load ballance your traffic, so you in effect can have double the bandwidth of using just one, but this requires routing configurations, and OS configuration changes.
As someone else said, you can also use one as a LAN port and the other as a WAN port, effectivly using your computer as a proxy server on a network. your cable modem / DSL modem would connect to your wan port, then your computer to your internal local area network (LAN port). All other computers would then be using yours as a proxy server, or it could be configured as a router, DNS server, DHCP server, etc. etc. There are many things you can do in that configuration.
You can also use two NICs as a type of firewall. Remember that a firewall is a philosophy, not a product. Firewalls can be utilized by getting hardware , software, utilizing policies or best practices. In this case, you may have two LAN’s you connect to, and to keep them apart from each other you may be using TCP/IP on one NIC and be using IPX traffic on the other, exclusivly. As long as your machine is not forwarding traffic, you would have a basic firewall between the two, but still be able to access both of them.
I hope that helps
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