INTRODUCTION

In order to get the most out of your Windows NT environment, it is important to adjust your network to achieve optimal performance. One of the considerations that must weigh heavily upon your mind is the fact that Windows NT is a GUI-based atmosphere and will require a greater degree of multimedia components. In fact, this trend is likely to increase and as time goes by, you should expect full motion video, sounds, and enhanced graphics to whiz through your network. Multimedia needs a larger amount of bandwidth and can cause congestion on older networks. It is a fact that personnel will not sit idly by waiting for graphics to slowly pan across their screen, they will rather go for a cup of coffee and your net operating system can end up costing you in productivity. However, you can get the most out of your new system by implementing a good media access method in your organization.

When you implement media access control rules, you allow several networked devices to negotiate access to your shared network infrastructure. Your goal is to network different types of methods that allow you to benefit from the methods for your organization.

In some situations you might find one media access method to work better than another. For example, an FDDI link might be better than employing Ethernet as a backbone for high speed networked workstations. In fact, it is more common to connect various types of networks that are connected into one machine.