You know what an uninterruptible power supply looks like, right? It's a heavy beige box with an IEC power socket on one end, one or more three-pin sockets on the other, a few lights and buttons.

Well, it can be.

Or it can look like this.

A Local Area Network (LAN) has been an essential tool for business computing for many years, and great fun for gaming for not quite so long. And setting up a basic small LAN is now a very easy task. But networking catalogues are full of bridges and switches and hubs and routers, making it hard for the beginner to figure out what's going on. What do you need, and what do you not?

This Web page will tell you. The first half is the stuff you need to know to knock together a basic Windows network for playing games or ordinary small business use. It tells you how the common kinds of Ethernet differ, and what to do to make your network work and keep it working. After that, there's the more technical information for people who are working with larger networks, or are just curious. Jump to the technical stuff.