The various flavors of 3com 3C905B NIC cards I have been getting here in new Micron and Gateway PC's don't work properly. If I reinstall Win98 and add the newest drivers and update the BIOS - sometimes they work. They don't want to work in the 400 mhz PII and 500 mhz PIII machines at all. Anyone have any ideas?

-- Paul Davis (davisp1953@yahoo.com), June 04, 1999

Answers

Reserve in your Bios an irq adress for these cards. Probably that might work.

-- Pieter Van der Hulst (pietervdh@hotmail.com), June 05, 1999.

Does not seem to help. By dint of great effort I have persuaded one of these cards to permit me to log on to Win98. It then shows the local network up to the router. However, I can only open shared drives and so forth on machines that use the same hub! The network past the router is usually invisible - even if not it cannot be used.

Very weird situation.

-- Paul Davis (davisp1953a@yahoo.com), June 08, 1999.

Question, I am working at one of those computer places you mention. Could you let me know the specific card type, ie part number and the like, and I'll see what I can do.

-- Chris Parsley (cparsley1@hotmail.com), June 25, 1999.

Finally figured out a partial answer. If you boot the new computer first and allow the Win98 installation to complete without connecting to the network, the install will finish without any trouble. Then reboot and set up the networking parameters in Win98. Then connect the card to a hub using an 8 wire cable, and then reboot again. Usually this will connect, if not, installing the newest version of the NIC drivers will get it connected.

Now since this is a 10mb network, none of the above should be necessary. But it is. Obviously, some sort of communication between the router and the NIC is taking place the first time the system starts up - since you can take it anywhere after this treatment and it will work.

This whole thing makes very little sense - but seems to boil down to a network setup or wiring issue. Since the boss here won't allow anyone to change (or even examine) the router setup, this is where it will probably stop.

-- Paul Davis (davisp1953@yahoo.com), July 26, 1999.