A few weeks ago, my network card seemed to sort of die. I was getting all kinds of errors trying to connect with my cable modem. I noticed in the Network appelet of the Control Panel that the card was showing up twice. Well, that didn’t seem right, so I removed it and tried to reinstall it. Everything seemed okay, but when I checked the Network settings again, it simply wasn’t there. It wasn’t in the device manager, either. I rebooted a few times. Still nothing. I obtained updated drivers. Nothing.
Finally, I gave in and got a new NIC. And … you guessed it. Jack. Zip. Zero. Zilch. Diddly squat. Both cards are PnP, but Win98 doesn’t recognize them when booting up. I had to install them through the Add New Hardware appelet. Windows also couldn’t find it when it searched for new hardware. I specified that I wanted to install a NIC and clicked the “Have Disk” button. Everything seemed to work fine there. No errors. Evidently there must have been some errors, or I’d be enjoying blazing fast Internet access right now instead of a free dial up. Any ideas, guys?
This probably won’t help, but try doing the uninstall/reinstall in Safe Mode (hit f8 during startup, and choose from the menu). Often, the Hardware Manager will be more accurate in Safe Mode, showing things like multiple copies installed.
How dusty is it inside your PC? could be that the slot you are plugging the cards into is dirty, or hosed. Try a different slot. Try vacuuming out you box. Is it a PCI or ISA card? Have you installed any software lately that would correspond time-wise with when the card started going bad? Try uninstalling that if so. Are any conflicts showing up on device manager? Anything listed under Other Devices? Remove them from there, as well as any NICs on the device manager and try detecting again.
You might also want to try to go into the Control Panel | System | Device Manager tab. Go to the Network Adapters section of the tree, and make sure there are no question marks or your old adapter there.
If you have more than one available PCI slot, you might try moving the NIC. I think that it is 3COM that doesn’t suggest putting their cars in a shared ISA/PCI slot or PCI slot 1
You know the Bios has this thing called NVRAM & its basically a memory of everything you have in the computer.
If you change the setting for it in the Bios to not remember the nvram then it can detect new stuff. Otherwise, it assumes the old stuff is still there.
There is also a specific problem with 3Com NICs and W98, where Windows insists on loading a non-working driver if a special installation process is not followed. You can find documentation on that embarassing bug at http://www.3com.com .
As always, blast the old NIC out of your device manager before loading the new NIC, no matter what kind it is. That goes for most hardware replacements.
OK, if the network card doesn’t show up on the device manager, try this. It has always worked for me, though it scares the hell out of me. Be sure to have your Win95/98 and any other driver disks handy.
Go into the Device Manager and click on “System Devices.” Look for the “PCI Bus.” Remove it.
When you reboot, the computer will search for every bit of hardware on it. It should find most of it without any special prompts. You may be prompted for software devices.
I’ve had to do this a couple of times. As I said, it worked each time. But don’t try it until you have exhausted other options.
Ah, thank you! That was the problem. It’s there now. The damn thing still doesn’t work with my modem, but neither does the PCIMCIA card on my laptop, so I guess that would be the modem’s problem. I have a tech coming out tomorrow to (hopefully) fix that problem, though. I’m not getting my hopes up. Last time they sent a guy out, the only thing he knew how to do was switch the modem out with another one. I discovered and corrected the real problem while he was there. Moron…