packets to bytes?

[souleman]

Palemoon> ummm, are you really confused or really tired. Yes there are 8 bits to a byte, but how many bites are there to a packet??? If I tell you I sent out 10 packets, how in the hell can you tell me how many bytes I sent? If you can show me, I would love to know, because a TCP/IP packet can be anywhere from 24 bytes (just a header) on up to something like 64K (don't remember right off hand, anyone can feel free to correct me on the size). A UDP packet is smaller.. An ICMP packet is even smaller. And we haven't even gotten into netbios, IPX, SMB, etc. type packets.

knightmb> I am not positive, but I believe it depends on the device and its drivers. I couldn't find anything on the knowledge base either, but on the few XP machines here, the Intel lan cards show one statistic, and the Linksys cards show the other, so I think it is related to the drivers.

[knightmb]

Thanks everyone for all the help and comments. I thought maybe it was a driver thing as well, but as you can see from the attached picture of device manager, they are both "3com" network cards, although not exactly the same model. I haven't updated the drivers to the latest from 3com, just using the M$ drivers. It does sound like a driver issue though. If I find anything, I'll be sure to post it here for the others that were curious.

[knightmb]

This is the side by side screenshot, one being packets the other bytes. Still a puzzle for me how it got that way or if it can be changed