A couple of years ago I ran Cat 5/E through my house, and now I've upgraded to a couple of gigabit switches (NetGear GS605) and some gigabit Ethernet cards (NetGear again) that claim that I am happily communicating at 1000 Mbps.
1) Does Gigabit Ethernet adjust its speed, based on the quality of the lines? So if I had put a sharp kink in the cabling somewhere, I might actually be running at only 416M or 732M or something?2) Is there a free program somewhere that I can run on two of my PCs and verify the actual speed? Or is it just as easy (and accurate) to copy some big honking file and see how long it takes?
3) Am I correct in believing there is no way for my PC to communicate with the gigabit switches and ask them what they think about the line quality?Thanks! Chris