Win95 and a 3C905-TX Detection Problem

[RedVR6]

Hi all. Quick question. A buddy of mine just got cable access at his house and uses an ancient Dell Optiplex P133 machine and he installed a 3COM NIC (3C905-TX) in its only PCI slot. Oddly, Windows 95 did not detect the card upon start up, which I found interesting. So I manually installed the card using drivers from 3COM (3C90x1.exe) that he had on disk...and was unable to get the card to work. Looking in Device Mgr. the card says the drivers installed were no good please update (in so many words).

I then removed all networking, and network adapters showing, rebooted and reinstalled TCP/IP and the card...and it still does not work. Although, it pings to 127.0.0.1 fine, shows activity via the LED's on the card....I have used the exact model card in many of my other machines from Win98 up thru WinXP with no problems whatsoever, completely plug and play.

Looking on 3Com's site...there is a previous version of the drivers (3C90xN1.exe) for this card, which I am going to try tomorrow.

Anyone have any tips or experiences with this card and it not working in Win95? Or maybe a work around to get this thing to work?

[glc]

On a machine that old use an ISA nic, look for a 3Com 3C509 or a generic "NE2000 compatible" for best results.

[RedVR6]

Thanks glc,

I ended up blowing the machine away today and putting Win98 on it. Did not feel like spending the time troubleshooting. All is well now. Now if he would just buy a new computer like I have been telling him for months.

[pointd]

For future reference we have had loads of problems with these NICs and Win95 at work. What we do is a quick trip into the BIOS and select Plug and Play aware OS to No. Works 9 out of 10.

[RedVR6]

Thanks for the tip! Unfortunately, this machine was just old enough not to have that option in BIOS. But I will def. keep that in mind.

[glc]

I tried installing a 3C905 on an old AOpen AP5C board with a P120 - even under 98se it wouldn't work. Same with a Linksys LNE100TX. I put an old ISA 3C509 in and it worked like a champ. The early PCI busses were really pretty bad. Had another one - an Acer Aspire with a P166 on a proprietary mobo with an ALi chipset - same deal, LNE100TX wouldn't work but an old D-Link DE-220 ISA worked fine. I'm guessing that the older boards aren't up to PCI 2.1 specs (bus mastering?) and those cards required it.