So, it’s an old computer - dual P3 600 MHz. Running XP, SP2. I tried one PCI wireless network card - I only ever managed to boot once successfully with that one; all over times it hang during loading of apg.sys (or some such agp driver.)
With the other wireless PCI network card, the computer boots fine, but doesn’t “see” it. I’ve tried “scan for new hardware”. Nothing shows up in Device Manager - no “yellow exclamation points”, in fact no network adapters at all. I’ve tried putting the card in the different PCI slots, with the same result. I tried changing various BIOS settings, in vain. (One marked “Plug and Play OS installed” looked promising, but didn’t help.)
Are there different “revisions” of PCI standards? Is it possible the computer is too old to see the PCI card? (The card works fine in other computers).
One thing I’ve seen problems with is that there are 5 volt cards and there are 3.3 volt cards, and there are cards that need both voltages. Some computers, especially if they have the old AT type power supply, often won’t have the 3.3 volt supply present and therefore cards that require it won’t work.
All PCI cards have a vendor ID and device ID. When the computer boots, you’ll see a list of all of the PCI devices found on your system (you may have to disable the splash screen if your computer uses one). You can look to see if the network card shows up on the list. Usually the list scrolls by so fast I have to reboot a few times to catch it. Since you don’t know what vendor and device ID to look for, just boot the computer without the network card and see what shows up then boot it with the network card and see if another device shows up.
Alternately, you can download RBPCI from here: http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/user/ralf/pub/WWW/files.html
(download the latest dat file too)
This is a utility that will identify every PCI device on your system, but it’s a command line thing not something that is particularly user friendly. You’ll want to redirect the output to a text file (RBPCI * > TEST.TXT).
Note that the vendor name may not be the same as the manufacturer of your card. Quite often the vendor name is the name of the manufacturer of the PCI interface chip on the board, not the manufacturer of the board itself.
If the system can’t see the vendor and device ID then there’s no hope at all for the card to work in the system. The computer won’t assign resources to it and won’t be able to talk to it at all. If the system does see the vendor ID and device ID then it’s the operating system that’s futzed up. Look on the manufacturer’s site and see if they have some spiffy trick for installing their driver.
Thanks, engineer_comp_geek - very useful info. I forgot to mention: by a stroke of luck, I had set that machine up as dual boot with XP/2K. The same behavior occurs under 2K, leading me to believe it’s hardware-related (even though XP & 2K share a lot of “DNA”.) I’ll try what you suggested and post the results.
How many open PCI slots do you have? Or PCI slots total?
Have you tried moving things around a bit into different PCI slots?
Yes, I tried that, as mentioned in the OP. There are 4 or 5 slots (not in front of the computer right now), none of which is used.