Network help please

[rkoenn]

I am working on a system for a friend. It is a K6-2 based box with a Via based motherboard. The OS is WinME. The system has a cheap network card installed and it had been functioning on a home network to another box using Internet Connection Sharing. A couple of weeks ago the networking quit functioning. There were no other apparent glitches with the system, other than a lot of old software and garbage but it ran fairly well otherwise. I installed it on my hard IPd network at my house and it exhibits the same problews. I cannot get to the Internet with it, I am on cable modem and all my other systems operate perfectly, and I cannot browse my network either. It gives the network inaccessible message when I try. From my main WinXP box, I can see his machine but cannot get into it and get a message about the machine being inaccessible, check your authorizations.

After fighting this for a while, I tried a different brand eithernet card, a new linksys card. After successfully installing it and configuring the networking, the machine exhibits the same problems.

Next I decided it might be with windows so I grabbed a clean drive and installed a clean winME onto the box. Well, it still does exactly the same thing. I have checked network settings carefully, logins, and everything else I can think of and cannot resolve this problem. If anyone has any further suggestions, please let me know.

Finally, is it possible for something to go wrong with another component, i.e. motherboard, that would cause this type of problem? Could all the other hardware/software seem to function normally and yet have this occur? This almost seems to be the only explanation. Today I will also try changing cards in slots again, which I have already done, and see if that makes any difference.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

 

[Scarpozzi]

I used to see this on some old Emachines back in the day. We'd swap out everything and even reload them and got nothing to work as for networking. However, I wouldn't give up. Just check your network card for a link light, make sure you have a client/adapter/protocol installed, and also try normal windows troubleshooting for ghost drivers. There's a possibility the motherboard may have onboard lan or wake on lan settings in the BIOS. These settings can sometimes send false signals to the OS and make it think you're computer has a default LAN adapter installed. So you might wanna go through your BIOS and check that. Another tip is to download a manual on your motherboard, if available. You can find out if it had any daughter boards or onboard expansion cards that might need to be disabled. Check all that stuff and keep at it, and if you still can't fix it....there's always Ebay!😀