Problems w/ ethernet card on an HP Pavilion

[Booty]

Hey, my roomate got a virus so we formatted his drive and reinstalled windows, except I chose to install it using my own win98 disc instead of the crappy HP version. Anyway, got all drivers installed fine except the ethernet card. The driver's installed, but first it doesn't enable the card. You have to go into it's properties through device manager and click enable device. Then after reboot it still doesn't work...it says the device is not working properly because windows can't load odiload.vxd which loads the drivers for the device. It says to correct the problem to run windows setup again, but I did and it didn't help....how do I get the *$&# nic installed?!?

 

[Ladi]

In my experience, the HP OEM cards have had various issues that wasted so much time in troubleshooting that it was just easier and more worth it to buy a $10-20 linksys or netgear...

~Ladi

 

[Tonec]

I have two HP nics that I still can't find drivers for. Card labeled a linksys but carries realtek/dfi chipset (windows has problems identifying it) Fairly common problem fixed only by replacing the nic.

 

[Booty]

You gotta be kiddin' me! WTF?! Once the drivers are uninstalled you have to buy a new nic? That's insane! Man, my roomate's nowhere near a techie or anything...how'm I supposed to explain this to him? He's gonna think I f'd up his computer :frown:

 

[chemwiz]

Tonec, have you tried the Realtek reference drivers for the NIC? They've gotten pretty good lately, I use them a lot.

 

[Ladi]

Explain to him that even when an HP running with the HP drivers has an oem ethernet card, it tends not to work At my current job, we'll often swap out HP oem cards without questions since getting them to work (with and without HP drivers) is more of a hassle than grabbing a new netgear...

And yes, the realtek reference drivers are worth a shot, if you can identify the chipset properly.

~Ladi

 

[JW310]

Try Driver Guide with the user name drivers and the password all to find the drivers for the network card. They usually have a decent selection of drivers to choose from for just about any piece of hardware out there.

JW

 

[subhuman]

If you have to replace it, no worries, a good LinkSys card is about $15 and really easy to setup.

HP's are crap for driver support. In order to get the one card (with video, modem, and soundcard all on one nice PCI card! oh nice!) to work, I had to reinstall from the emergency disk the entire Windows95. The drivers weren't on there separately, and driverGuide didn't have it. It also reinstalled all the ads for online services and the junk software giving me 50 or so directories off the root full of useless junk.

Ahh... OEM machines... such nasty fond memories... of hitting that machine with a sledge hammer. Wish I took pics :]

 

[Tonec]

The problem with using the realtek drivers is that during the initial hardware detection it will sometimes show up and realtek, install the drivers etc the reboot....windows suddenly decides that the nic is now a dfi chipset. Just throw the nic away, the hassle is not worth the 10 dollars to replace it.