hi guys, well reading some of the forums on this website its very clear to me that NetBEUI is the fastest solution for sharing files over a small network and the main argument for it is that NetBEUI uses less overhead compare to TCP/IP but i dont really understand what this means, can someone please explain what is this overhead thing and how it effects the speed of the network? thanks

"a protocol like NetBEUI does not use any logical addressing, and isn’t routable. Why is that? Because when a router comes across a NetBEUI packet, it has no way of determining where the destination host resides, since a NetBEUI packet does not include a logical destination address, only a name. The protocol cannot be routed; this means that communication between NetBEUI hosts is limited to occurring within a single non-routed network. Obviously that limits NetBEUI’s usefulness on a large internetwork" from here: http://www.2000trainers.com/cisco-c... Netbeui packets are smaller than tcp/ip packets and as such travel faster since they have less overhead and have less to read. Example of Oxymoron: Person who is pro life and anti sex education. Education is key to prevention. Prevent conception you prevent abortion. Abstinence training clearly isn't working.

Overhead means, all transmitted and received packets, that are not part of the transmitted data. E.g.: If you download a file from the internet, the server is sending checksums for that packets. The client (your pc) gets the checksums and compares these with the one of the received packet. If it's equal, your pc sends an ok to the server and a "I'm ready to receive the next packet". So everthing needed to manage a correct transfer of data, or to make sure, that devices on the network are available (maybe servers and printer a.s.o.) and how to reach them. That's a short and easy description of what overhead is.