Distributing bandwith on a router (?)

Hi guys,
My internet connection sucks (~40 kb/sec), so I'd like to distribute the bandwidth wisely. I have a desktop connected physically to a router, and then two laptops on wireless connection.
I would like to give priority to one PC over another. i.e. the desktop is downloading something, but if my laptop ask for it, it should yield it all or most bandwidth.
Is that feasible? I'm sure there is a software that does it.
Thanks for the help.

 

The solution is in the router, if your router supports it. There is nothing you can do on your machines that can monitor the other machines.

You can get very expensive network appliances an software to do these things, but at the consumer level you need a router than supports third party firmware like dd-wrt.

dd-wrt will allow QoS bandwith limiting to a machine via ip address or mac address, but your requirement might exceed the ability of that based on what you are doing.

You can give more to one machine over another, but than asking it to switch to the other machine may exceed the ability of the firmware....I have never tried what you are attempting, so I cannot say with certainty

 

I see, so I guess is way harder than I thought.
Thanks for the answers.

 

buy a router with something called QoS ( quality of service ), so u can configure bandwidth limitations and things like that

 

the problem is not so easily solved by QoS

QoS allows you to reserve bandwidth for a specific machine or application--it does not monitor your network and dynamically switch between them. As I was trying to say--maybe he can set up some rules so that when he runs a specific application, a QoS rule will supercede another, but simple QoS is not going to solve his specific request

 

Most QoS rules are simply precedence rules. You simply set the MAC address of your wireless card on your laptop to the highest QoS, and anything else to the lowest. That should do exactly what he's wanting, give faster service and lower latency to the laptops over the plugged-in desktop.

 

@gerry
i mean like a Cisco QoS router which will cost u a good amount of money , and u ll need an Cisco technician to configure your router for priority issues
@pitabred if there is a router that can do this with a cheap price just link it to em

 

Oh, that's what I said two posts before yours....I thought you were going with a cheap router with QoS

You can do QoS with many routers, and dd-wrt allows some interesting prioritizing with QoS, but I don't think you can do what the OP is looking for.

 

considering that the OP has 40 kbps of bandwidth, doing anything with QoS is pretty hopeless. That's not enough bandwidth for the simplest of xbox net games much less sharing it with other machines.

The 'wisest' advice might be to connect one machine and ONLY one machine at any given time.

 

^^^ Makes sense, good advice newposter.

I'm running QoS via (dd-wrt) on my Routers and I must say for home networking devices it's not perfect but it tries its best to do what the OP is asking. Now if you spend the money for a business class Router or Firebox Firewall device you're most likely to see the results that you wish then.

 

Get a app called bwmeter, install on all 3 computers and it will do what you want.