HATE WIN98! Having a PnP and TCP/IP problem - this is my last resort!

[AceHigh1234]

I was setting up DSL at a clients house. He has windows 98SE 4.10.2222A on a AMD Athelon 1Ghz processor with 256 RAM. Some guy built the system for the gentleman I am working for about three years ago and there have been weird things going on since I took it over. For instance, there is 8 MB of RAM that is being shared to the onboard video (it's got the motherboard with 4 USB, LAN, sound and video all built in) but my client was complaining he couldn't see AOL and it was because I couldn't get better than 640x480x16 resolution without buying an 8MB PCI ATI brand video card. anyway, DSL was working and I was getting ready to go, and then it stopped working. I checked out the network settings and there was 6 network adapters installed, and netBUI and IPX/SPX and anyway, I removed all of the adapters and protocols that weren't needed, and a duplicate of the adapter that I needed. The whole PC went haywire. All of the devices (ACAPI, monitor, video card, printer, built in LAN and the PCI lan, serial and paralell ports - EVERYTHING) uninstalled. When I rebooted, everything but the network adapters came up on the new hardware found wizard. I used the win98 CD and reinstalled everything, but the internal NIC and the PCI network adapters were not found by PnP. Also I can't get the video settings to stay above 640x480x16 and the adapter says ATI VGA adapter in device manager after I reboot (I guess I need to reinstall the drivers from the disk), but that's not the issue. My issue is the NICs. The lights go on in both of them when an ethernet cable is plugged in to them, and I've tried moving the PCI NIC to every slot in the computer to no avail, windows 98 PnP will NOT see it and it will not show up in device manager. The PCI NIC is an SMC 1244 TX 10/100 basic NIC. I tried forcing it to install, but it shows up with a yellow ! in device manager. When I try to run winipcfg I get a fatal error with the TCP/IP stack (which I used LSPfix and winsockfix.exe to try to repair) and when I go to network from the control panel, there is NOTHING listed. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling TCP/IP to no avail. This is driving me crazy because I tried everything I could think of short of reinstalling the OS. I had to leave the resolution of this issue for Monday, and if anyone could help, I would be VERY appreciative! I told my client I was bamboozled for the time being, but a worst case scenario would be a total reinstall of the OS, but seeing as how it was a non-standard hardware configuration and windows 98 sucks, mabye we should purchase and install XP and he seemed amiable to that solution. I just want to make it cost effective for him, so I don't spend hours messing with it only to get him a cruddy windows 98 box for the same price as skipping any further troubleshooting and just going with XP.... anyway I know I've rambled on for long enough, so thanks in advance

-Mark

 

[AceHigh1234]

PS I tried enbabling and disabling PnP OS setting in bios, and reset configuration data like 10 times... I actually thing that it might have been when I changed the pnp OS setting to yes that I had to reinstall all of my hardware... anyway thanbks again

 

[edfair]

Any special drivers needed for the NIC? Since there is a problem with it, the normal step would be to refresh with the floppy from SMC. Or from the M/B driver CD. And the same issues with the video.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[G0AOZ]

There is undoubtedly a very good reason for having TWO NICs installed and enabled, but maybe you are now experiencing some conflicts between the pair of them. Try getting the on-board one to work properly first with the motherboard supplied drivers disk, then add the PCI one later. You may need to set up the SMC NIC with the diags/setup disk supplied with it.

I'm surprised you cannot get more than 16 colours out of the on-board video adaptor. Again, suggests a possible conflict or incorrect driver.

ROGER - G0AOZ.