Can't get LAN card to bind with tcp/ip

[karlk123]

I had a Kingston KNE40T 10BaseT LAN card installed and working fine with my SMC router (via DHCP) and DSL modem (in a Dell XPS T600, Win 98SE). I wanted to upgrade to a 10/100 card, so I removed the old LAN card from the Network icon in control panel, shut down the pc, swapped cards, booted, installed the drivers for the SMC1211TX 10/100 lan card. Win98SE finds the card, configures the IRQ, says the driver and board are fine. The LAN led is lit on the board, so the router acknowledges it's there, but there is no activity and Windows does get the IP address from the DHCP router. I backtracked by removing the new card and drivers, reinstalling the old card/drivers, rebooted. The old LAN card is found, the diagnostics say its ok, but I now have the same problem -- I can't get onto the network or internet. I tried moving the card into other slots (my Dell T600r is full with 4 PCI cards), but to no avail. Some one recommended booting in Safe mode, then removing the card but I had no luck here. I recently added more RAM from 128M to 256M total, could this be an issue?

What do I need to do to get either card working? I suspect somewhere Win98SE is confused with respect to networking.

[Dodge]

Hey karl, Welcome to CTH. Hopefully someone will be along with some help information for you. Hang in there......

[lynnm]

The additional memory will not be a factor here.

When removing a device from a PnP environment you should use the following procedure:

1.)Remove the device in device manager.
2.)Do a total shut down.
3.)Physically remove the card.
4.)Reboot
5.)Shut down.
6.)Physically install the new device.
7.)Reboot
8.)Install the drivers for the new device.
9.)YOU GUESSED IT reboot

I ran into a somewhat similar problem yesterday at work but with a twist. Our site is moving from HP Vectras that use an integrated 3com NIC to Compaq Deskpro EN's which use an integrated Intel 10/100 NIC.

The 3com's were quite happy to use the same computer name and host name for DNS. The Compaq's no playa da game! The solution in our case was to give the computer a slightly different TCP/IP host name and all is well again in cyberland.

In other words, the identifier branson,(a totally fictitious name etc. - Sorry Hackerz) served equally well as a user name and as a DNS Host name when we were using the 3coms. When we shifted to the Compaq's we found it necessary to give the user and the computer slightly different names. In the case described above the user name would remain as branson but the computer name would be branso1 or bransod etc. The point is that the user name and the computer name could no longer be identical - notwithstanding that that had been the normal setup when we were using the 3com NIC.

[karlk123]

Hi Lynn,

Well, I've tried this procedure and several others (some have recommended doing a safe boot to remove the network info, then shutdown and remove the card. Some have recommended that adding another protocol somehow resets some things. Sorry, no such luck. I finally resorted to doing a complete restore of the C drive. Now all is happy. When I restored only the Windows directory, not enough was cleared out. I suspect some part of Windows got corrupted (the system file checker found nothing). Thanks for your help.