Plug and Play my arse!

[Fellmeister]

Hi guys, i'm a BSc Computing student, so obviously I don't know jack about about the practical stuff.

Basically I pur-chased a DLink 530tx network card in an effort to get my and me housemate's pc's linked up.

Popped the hood, slipped her in, turned her over and Win98 picked it up fine. It wanted drivers which I didn't have so I downloaded the correct ones off the offical site and unpacked them. Restarted, card was picked up, pointed to the drivers when asked for them, then it wanted the Win98 cd. I put it in, it couldn't find the files it wanted, I looked on my hard drive instead and there they were. Files were copied etc, installation seemed to go fine but when I look in the device manager properties for it, it says that installation failed for some unspecified reason.

The Win98 version I have on my PC may not be the same as the disk I have as the CD is SE whereas I have no idea what it installed on the machine. Would this matter?

I'm stuck up the perverbial without a certain propulsion device. I don't really want to re-install windows cos that'll wipe over Linux i've got.

Any clues?

 

[Fellmeister]

Come on guys, give me a break!

I'm that desperate for a reply i'd even be happy with a wee flame from Peter Parker...

 

[DnetMHZ]

Have you tried the card in another PCI slot?.. sometimes NIC's can be picky about where they are installed.

 

[Techwhore]

Have you tried using windows built in drivers? D-link cards are pretty wide spread and i can't imagine that they couldn't be found in the driver base. The performance may not be as good as d-links drivers or the most updated drivers, but at least it'd work.

 

[Fellmeister]

Ok guys, thanks for the help , I think i'm going to do a combination of the two.

First i'll pop the bad boy out and find anouther slot for it. Is there any rhyme or reason to where it should be placed. As it stands my graphics card and modem are nect to each other with a spare in between, should you fill them every other slot or does it not make a ballys worth of difference?

Secondly see how much cop those windows drivers are.

Which is the best way to install? Plug and play as it boots or add hardware on the control panel? Does one have a greater chance of success than the other?

D.

 

[Techwhore]

Generally it's a good rule of thumb not to fill the PCI slot next to the your AGP, i'm assuming u r using an AGP card. Fill it if u must, it's not gonna hinder you from setting up the card, the worse case scenario is u have an IRQ conflict and have to manually assign them, but let's not worry about that.

As far as Plug and Pray (TM) and Add New Hardware go, there's no difference, whichever you feel like going through is fine.

Let us know how it turns out.