on my router’s box it came in, it says on it
“Shared Internet access for up to 253 PCs using one IP address”
what does this mean, does it mean i can link 253PCs together?
yes - you answered your own question 
yea, but how the hell can i link 253pc’s to a router with 4 ports.
What router is it?
If its wireless, then yes it is possible, although the speed would be remarkably slow due to the huge demand.
its a wired router :s
you can use another router off that, all a router does is dish out more IP’s basically…
ah, so basicly to have 253 computer on that i would have to buy a hell of alot more routers, or some wireless router, ah i wont have that many, the maximum i will ever have is 4 
Actually, you’d have to buy more switches to physically connect all 253 machines to the router (see our Networking FAQ). Even then, a low-end router like that would probably choke on that much throughput. 
In any case, they get the 253 number from a single subnet; in other words, there are 255 addresses in a subnet, 0 and 255 are broadcast addresses which can’t be used by network devices. 1 is the default address of your router itself, so that leaves you with 253 addresses to work with.
-AT
hey are you trying to say my computer is a pile of crap, or that you would need a server for that much computers, also, an amd-64 4000+ would choke on that much throughput :mad:
you can buy cables that branch the 1 of the four ports into like 4 and then into 16, and etc.
willhub it’s not so much the computer that’s the problem, it’s the amount of bandwith available. If your looking at 253 computers sharing a 10/100 connection there’s not that much bandwith open for each computer in a LAN enviroment, and much less when your talking a broadband connection which may go up to 7-10MB.
Also the other problem comes into play with the routers, unless your going with a high end Cisco, Nortel or similar companies your going to find the hardware inside is really only meant for connecting maybe at most 25 systems.
ah i see