I’ve been having problems with my Ethernet card lately (posting this from the lab), and I think it may be dead. Hey, it’s five years old, and has had a cumulative operating time of over a year, so it’s not exactly unexpected, but I don’t want to give up hope unless I have to. The symptoms are thus: For a few days, whenever I first started up the machine, it would work fine at first, and give me a few bytes worth of download. However, before it even finished loading anything, my computer would freeze up: It wouldn’t even respond to the magic three keys. If I then hard-reset, I would get an error message saying that the card wasn’t working right, but everything else would then run normally and stably. If I shut down and let it rest for a while, this would repeat. Now, it always gives the error message, unless I uninstall the card, and even the card-specific setup program doesn’t recognize the card’s existence (it sometimes did, even if Windows didn’t). It’s a Novell-Anthem NE2000 compatible card, my machine is a Pentium 100 MHz, and I’m running Windows 95.
I have two questions: First of all, is there any way to save the card, and if so, what? Secondly, if (as I fear) the answer is no, then how much do new ethernet cards cost nowadays?
I don’t know about “Novell Anthem Compatible”, and if that means anything sepcial, but you can get a top-quality 10/100 MBit Ethernet card for prices ranging from $8 - $16. Sometimes CompUSA has even given them away for free (after rebate).
Ethernet is so standardized I don’t know if there is really much of a difference in quality anymore between most cards. That having been said, I still stick with either good-old 3Com, or Linksys, for driver support and because the price difference between a 3Com card and a generic “Ass Clown Ethernet Card” is only a few bucks.
In thinking about your post more, it does sound like a card problem, or a Windows TCP/IP issue. Since the cards are so cheap, you will probably save time and money just buying a new card and trying it, rather than trying to salvage the older one.
I tend to be pretty cynical about Windows, but I’d say that there’s a fair (not necessarily excellent) chance that Windows is at fault and not your ethernet card. Since Windows crashes when the problem occurs, it looks like you’re not going to be able to do any meaningful troubleshooting that way…
I don’t know how familiar you are with Unixoid OSes, but I would suggest booting one of the mini Linux distributions that fit on a floppy and loads into RAM such as trinux.
Follow its directions for getting your ethernet card up (NE2000 clones are generally easy to get working; you should find out beforehand from Windows what IRQ and IO address it uses, and also your IP settings of course). FTP some files or something to generate network traffic, and check the output of the ‘dmesg’ command if it stops working–if it’s broken, this will tell you about it.
Feel free to ask any more questions you have about the above procedure if you’d like to try it.
And you should be able to get a new ethernet card of roughly the same caliber for about $10 if you shop around.
I’ve been using the SMC 10/100 PCI cards; they generally run about $15 with a copy of Linux and a 6’ cable.
Does NE have a web site? They might have an updated driver.
I’m pretty sure that it’s not just a Windows problem. The card came with a dedicated program for changing the card settings, written for DOS (remember, I did say the card was old). This DOS program doesn’t recognize the card, either. The fact that Windows crashes when a piece of hardware ceases to exist is, of course, a Windows problem, but that’s not the ultimate cause here. I probably will just buy a new card, if they can be had for teens of dollars.
Chronos, unless you are like me (and I pity you if you are) and like wasting time on things like this, at the going prices you are better off getting a brand new card.
Cards are very cheap and your time is valuable. If your machine has a PCI slot try to get one of these as they will auto-configure more easily than the ISA slot types. Also try swapping the cable out to make sure it is functioning.
If you want to know absolutely-positively that your card is dead or malfunctioning there should be some sort of diagnostic test utility in the setup and driver diskettes that came with the card if any of those are still around. Sometimes older Win3.1 / Win95 NIC setups will also put card driver statements into the DOS autoexec.bat and config.sys statements. If these are munged up they might also be causing problems. Try rem’ing them out if they are present and see if it makes any difference.
I have one or two ISA NE 2000 ethernet cards lying around gathering dust as I stick to PCI setups when possible nowdays. If you want one drop me a line and I’ll mail it to you at no charge.
You might look into Egghead or one of the online shops. They usually have competitive pricing and fast delivery. Just don’t go to the bookstore on campus! :eek: