How can a nic installation slow down bootup time

[G.Robert]

I went ahead and reinstalled Win98se, the latest Intel Chipset Utility and then the Intel Ultra ATA instead of the Application Accelerator and everything seems ok, sort of.......

While the problem I described in my initial post seems resolved by the above action, something new has popped up. The only card installed in the rig thus far had been the video card (Visiontek Ti-200), so after I did the reinstall of 98se and Intel drivers, I installed the nic (Linksys 10/100).

What I've noticed is the system seems a little sluggish since, and especially during boot up. The boot time has almost doubled since installing the nic. For example, before the nic, if I did start--shutdown---restart, it only took about 30-35 seconds to be back to the desktop and ready to go. Now it's 60-70 seconds, very noticeable. It seems to really crawl at boot when it's at the device listing screen, where it seems to take 20 or more seconds there alone.
I installed the nic in pci slot #3 and there are no other cards installed (other than AGP).
I did notice the nic has irq #9, as does one of the usb listings, but it seems difficult to avoid sharing with one of the usb's as the have or share 4 of the irq's.

Any suggestions on this?

 

[FUBAR]

Whenever you add a card in the 98 series, if tcp/ip is bound to the netcard it will be set up for dhcp. The slowdown is your card sending out requests for IP information before starting up and subsequently failing because there is no dhcp server on your network

You'll notice that if you either put a dhcp server up (router box, etc) or set the ip info statically then your bootup will speed up dramatically.

 

[G.Robert]

FUBAR-

When I get connected to cable modem service next week would that fix the problem? How do I set the ip info statically to fix the bootup speed problem?

 

[neuralfx]

are you even connected to a network right now? if not just disable the nic in device manager, if you have a network going, just go into the network properties , then tcpip properties of the machines and set them to 192.168.1.x addresses .. well good luck ..
-neural