View Single Post
  #1  
Old May 24th 06, 11:35 AM posted to microsoft.public.win98.networking
external usenet poster
 
Posts: n/a
Default Reminder on installing a NIC

The majority of the advice I found in
searching this newsgroup about how to
install a network interface card leads
to excessive optimism that Windows will
recognize new hardware.

So this is for the benefit of, you know,
the six people in the world who still
need to add an Ethernet card to a Windows
98 system. In my case, I want to download
software to an old 200MHz Pentium box to use
it as a dedicated controller of a digital
camera.

When I installed Windows 98 SE on a clean hard
drive, it never saw the NIC (an SMC EZ Card
1244) that was plugged in. When I subsequently
tried to use the "Add Hardware" icon, the
choices it presented, to make a long story short,
didn't provide for locating the drivers on
the CD-ROM that came with the card. I had
deleted all the stuff in the Network icon
list box that everybody says has to be deleted.
I had also gone to the System icon and
deleted everything under "Network adapters."
This didn't work, so I then pulled the card,
rebooted, replaced the card and rebooted, looking
for Windows to announce new hardware, which
it didn't.

Finally I found a posting that mentioned
the "PCI Ethernet Controller." I went to
the System icon again, found it lurking
in the device lineup, and deleted it.
This did it. I didn't even have to reboot.
I simply used the "Add hardware" icon, which this
time gave me a series of pop-ups that identified
the card and allowed me to designate the CD-ROM
as the source for the driver. When this sequence
was finished, I used the Run widget to execute winipcfg
to release and refresh the IP, and I was on-line.

--
Charles Packer
mailboxATcpacker.org
http://cpacker.org/whatnews