What is wrong? Network card crashes one system, slows the other down to a crawl during boot up.

[mellondust]

I have two systems running win98se with the same network card: Netgear fa311 ethernet network card, and same chipsets on the motherboards: via apollo pro133. I am trying to set up a lan and am having problems. I can get one system to work fine after boot up, but when booting it slows and takes about two minutes longer than normal. The other system won't work on the lan and after a hour or so for no peticular reason crashes and reboots when I am not even trying to do any networking stuff.

I know it is some incompatability with the network card becuase when I disable them in the system profile I have no problems at all with either system. It is not just the brand becuase I tried it with a linksy network card and had the same problem. What is wrong here and how can I fix it. I am drooling at playing some games head to head with a friend and my whole plan is getting wiped out!

 

[zephyrprime]

Netgear sucks. My netgear card only gave me 5MB/s on my network but when I replaced it with a different card, it went up to 8MB/s. Also, the card eventually gave me some weird messages about it being broken. And benchmarks I've read online concerning gigabit ethernet cards showed that Netgear stuff sucks compared to other brands.

Just do yourself a favor and forget about even trying to diagnose this problem. Just return your netgear card and buy some Intel or 3com Nics instead. They cost more but they're worth it.

 

[RanDum72]

Avoid the Netgear FA311's. They have a bunch of incompatibility and reliability issues ( I had two crap out within a month). If you go Netgear, go with the older FA310TX. Now thats a solid NIC.

 

[Heretik]

Couldn't tell you why it causes one to crash (could be any of a number of reasons). The reason it extends the boot up time on your other system, though, is because it is Windows searching for an IP address to assign to your machine. You can avoid this by manually assigning one yourself (192.168.0.1 for example).

 

[AnAndAustin]

Some things to consider, try the PCI NIC in a different PCI slot, it could be a prob with the PCI slot (esp if the one next to the AGP card is occupied) or else the card may not be fully in, ideally you shouldn't be able to see any pins. You can also try the BIOS, either reseting PnP dta or reserving certain resources. Another point is that VIA chipsets ALL have a small prob with the PCI bus, always download and install the 'VIA PCI Latency Patch', it may not solve your prob, but is very worthwhile none-the-less.

 

[zephyrprime]

It might be an irq conflict too.