My daughter Dragonblink tells me that this is the place to get the answers.
Here’s the setup. Toshiba 660CDT (a seven-year-old laptop, P150, 80 megs memory, so installing any newer operating system is out of the question, just so you know). Win98SE. Linksys Combo PCMCIA ethernet card, with dongle. Card known to be good (tested with Linksys utility multiple times and passed).
When the card was first installed, it worked fine. Network connection was good, internet access was speedy. Over time, the internet access got slower and slower and slower and finally ceased to work. The computer could also no longer connect to the network. That’s how things remain today.
So far I have: tried different network cables and ports on the router and switch. Removed and replaced the card, both physically and via software. Replaced the original card with another one known to be good. Removed and replaced all network protocols, including deleting Winsock keys in the registry. Run winipcfg and ipconfig multiple times. Checked the properties in Network Neighborhood and verified that they are correct. Reinstalled the Linksys card’s drivers. Run Spybot Search & Destroy multiple times. As a last resort, ran Windows Setup and had it reinstall Win98SE. No dice.
When Windows boots, the activity light on the dongle flashes repeatedly and keeps flashing until after I’ve cleared the “password for networking logon” box by pressing enter. (I don’t remember ever specifying a password and there are no *pwd files on the computer anywhere.) Then, nothing. No network connection, no internet connection. The switch does acknowledge that the card is there (one light goes on) but there is no activity other than the one light.
This wouldn’t be so frustrating if it had never worked, but it DID work, for quite a while. Anyone got any ideas? Any more information I need to supply? Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi, you’re my only hope.
OK, so that setup won’t run any other OS in any meaningful fashion, but for diagnostic purposes you could try a CD-boot of Linux, with Knoppix or similar, to see if you can get anthing more out of the hardware. No harm can come from trying that, anyway!
You’ve rounded up and shot all the usual suspects. It sounds like your PCMCIA network card is dead (functionally if not electrically) . You can get new ones on Ebay for around $ 10 or so.Be sure it is a 16 bt PCMCIA card and not a newer 32 bit type card, or it may not work, as (IIRC) I don’t think the 660CDT cardbus slot will handle 32 bit cards.
I mis-used the term, I should have said “card slot”. The P-150’s and P-166 Win 95 class notebooks were right at the edge of the transition from 16 to to 32 bit cards. A few had 32 bit slots, but many did not. By the time the P-200 Win 98 notebooks came out, almost all were 32 bit compliant.
Trust me, infmom has no shortage of older geek friends.
She’s already acquired another card, one that the previous owner knew was in working condition, put it in the laptop, and no dice. I would lend her the one from my laptop, but there’s no way her poor little 660 could handle it.
It’s especially baffling because, as she said, the original card did work for a while. Then it got slower and slower and finally ground to a halt, and now neither it nor the other card will work. Is there anything inside the intestines of the laptop itself that could give out over time to cause that?
It’s possible (though unlikely) that the slot could be dead. If you have a cross over CAT5 cable, or a hub and regular cables, do a small networked connection between your notebooks, and see if your machines can “see” each other. That will tell you definitively if the notebook network connections is defective, or it’s an issue with the cable modem interface/configuration.
Huh. Well I’ll be dipped. I have never seen this problem with Linksys. It usually happens with Xircom combos.
You ever heard the old dentist’s joke “your teeth are fine, but your gums will have to come out”? This is similar.
All the data you’ve presented seems to say that the card is working normally, as is your PCMCIA slot (I’m assuming you hear the <bloo-BLEEP> PC Card initialization sound during boot?), and presuming there are no exclamations on the card or the PC slots in Device Manager, Windows is AOK as well.
You have several choices:
And I’ll begin with the requisite insulting question: you’ve installed all the pertinent driver updates available for this machine from Toshiba?
FDISK and FORMAT, then clean reinstallation of Windows. If you do try this, do not plug in the network card until the installation of Windows is finished and all other devices are working properly. (Most extreme option, and not a panacea in this case.)
Try an end-run. Right-click Network Neighborhood, Properties, then delete the NIC from the list. Close the Properties page but don’t reboot yet. Go to Device Manager, delete the NIC. Don’t reboot. Shut the computer down fully. Remove the NIC physically from the slot. Reboot in Safe Mode. Go back to Device Manager. If the NIC is still there, delete it again. Reboot normally, still without the NIC. Go back to Device Manager and delete the PCMCIA services. Shut down. Cold boot and Windows will detect the PCMCIA services. Once it’s done, Windows will probably force you to reboot yet again. After reboot, plug in the NIC. You should hear the <bloo-BLEEP> sound, and Windows should recognize the card and load the drivers. Ensure your network settings are correct, then reboot for the moment of truth. (Less extreme, but still not a cure-all.)
You seem pretty savvy. Do you know anything about upper memory? See, what usually happens is you’re working along with no problems with the NIC, then one day, POOF! The simple explanation is that the card needs a certain range of memory in order to operate properly, but your BIOS has let something else occupy that space. Since the NIC loads as a process of Windows, it gets the shaft, and unless you tell the computer what to do, it’ll never work again. So you’ll need to identify the memory range specific to that particular card, then exclude it in Device Manager. Here’s a tried-and-true link to the repair process. (This option is much more complicated, but fairly effective, in most cases.)
One other item to consider is a BIOS update. A more advanced BIOS may eliminate these contention issues. Please be very careful if you try this one.
Got a different PCMCIA network card tonight (brand new in unopened box) and it does the exact same thing. Activity light flashes until after I clear the logon box and then it stops dead.
I’m sure it’s a Windows internal problem, nothing to do with the card. The problem is that I don’t have a clue how to smack Windows around till it works.
:mad:
The 660CDT is Toshiba’s hinky little secret… they NEVER got Cardbus to work right in this model. Drove us collectively crazy when I was doing tech support for Toshiba.
Alas, that gets into the one area where this computer definitely has something wrong with it: The speaker is just about kaput. So I don’t hear any bloops or bleeps at all. I have two PCMCIA card slots; I’ll try swapping the card into the other slot, which I know is good because my PCMCIA modem works just fine in it.
Lordy, I don’t want to have to FDISK et al. (Not that I haven’t done it enough times on enough computers over the years, but still, what a royal feathered pain.) Yep, I have all the various and sundry drivers from Toshiba, I used to do tech support for them on their CompuServe forum, so I had access to all that stuff.
I’ll try the upper-memory workaround. The manual for the new card I got tonight mentions that, but only in connection with using the card in DOS. It won’t hurt to put the necessary NOEMS command into my autoexec and see what happens.
(Got my A+ certification about the time this computer was manufactured.)
