Many years ago, I once brought a crossover cable from home to the office to do some data transfer from a workstation to a company-issued laptop. The IT department issuing the laptop, being lovers of all things Microsoft, claimed crossover cable was "obsolete" due to auto-sensing used by Windows.
I am just another dumb end user, I do not work in IT, but I still get faster data transfer between two computers with crossover cable than by going through a third computer, or God forbid, over Wifi.
Sounds like crossover cable is not "obsolete" after all. Who would have thought.
Microsoft's customers, e.g., IT departments, are arguably complicit in the sad "state-of-the-art" you describe. The best software I have ever used was written by volunteers.
Money can't buy everything. As Microsoft has shown, it can certainly buy customers.
As a sibling comment alluded to; the _crossover_ cable was obsolete, not the the ethernet cable. You can usually use a straight ethernet cable with modern devices, you don't need a crossover cable. The auto-sensing they were talking about is what's built into the NIC, and it detects how the pairs of pins in your cable are being used.
Have you tried connecting two computers with just a patch cable? With the auto-sensing Ethernet ports, it works as if the cable were a crossover cable.
Auto-MDIX was starting to become the norm on nicer hardware when GbE started gaining adoption, and the MDI layer of GbE effectively obsoletes the concept of MDIX by specifying that pairs must always be probed. This was sort of required due to GbE requiring four pairs while Fast Ethernet required two, it is sort of expected that a GbE interface will encounter improper cables and it needs to detect that to degrade to Fast Ethernet.
So for GbE it's all but guaranteed, for Fast Ethernet it depends on how much money the device vendor was willing to spend on the interface, basically. Later laptops should be pretty reliable.
Or course none of this has anything to do with Windows, it all happens at a hardware level which can sometimes make investigating problems a bit painful.
I'll admit that I don't know if it would have worked then. And it has only been recently that I have got two computers which both have gigabit ports. I don't remember ever using a crossover cable as I always had a switch. I do remember having to manually assign IP addresses in that configuration as it didn't have a DHCP server to assign them.
Seems like folks replying and voting may have assumed I was always using recently purchased hardware. That would be an incorrect assumption. Sure, there's auto-sensing in some newer hardware and Windows may support it, but that does not mean crossover cable does not work, too. They both work. Neither is obsolete, but only one works with older hardware.
Wonder why the parent comment I was replying to mentioned crossover cable in particular. If it's obsolete why mention it.
You are confusing two different conversations. Your IT department are the ones that used the language "obsolete", because they likely knew that the laptop (which they provided) supported auto-sensing and therefore there was no need for them to provide you with a special cable to achieve a direct PC-to-PC ethernet connection.
Whereas the parent comment probably only used the language "crossover" because they were trying to be explicit about the fact that they are talking about a direct PC-to-PC ethernet connection. Not because crossover wiring is actually necessary to make that configuration work.
Furthermore, support for auto-sensing has nothing to do with the OS, or Microsoft.
First, I provided the cable. They were commenting on the idea of using a crossover cable, not a request for one.
Second, you are guessing what the commenter meant by crossover cable. I think he meant crossover cable. There is nothing to suggest otherwise.
Third, I never said auto-sensing had anything to do with the OS or Microsoft. I said the IT department loved Microsoft. You got confused and made a connection between the two.
This thing with Microsoft Windows is that it encourages the user to upgrade their hardware. Whereas I prefer NetBSD as a personal OS, and it does no such thing. Not every computer I own has auto-sensing nor a particularly fast NIC.
The questions I raised are 1. whether crossover cable still works (with both older and newer hardware) and 2. whether it is faster than alternatives.
I am just trying to explain why your comment is grey. To be clear, there is no speed increase from using a crossover cable instead of a straight-through cable together with auto sensing.
Many years ago, I once brought a crossover cable from home to the office to do some data transfer from a workstation to a company-issued laptop. The IT department issuing the laptop, being lovers of all things Microsoft, claimed crossover cable was "obsolete" due to auto-sensing used by Windows.
I am just another dumb end user, I do not work in IT, but I still get faster data transfer between two computers with crossover cable than by going through a third computer, or God forbid, over Wifi.
Sounds like crossover cable is not "obsolete" after all. Who would have thought.
Microsoft's customers, e.g., IT departments, are arguably complicit in the sad "state-of-the-art" you describe. The best software I have ever used was written by volunteers. Money can't buy everything. As Microsoft has shown, it can certainly buy customers.