Network cards and Win98SE - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

13 May 2019

...
  Message: 1
 Date: Sun, 12 May 2019 17:41:24 -0500
 From: "Charles" <charlesmorris800 at centurytel.net>
 To: "cctalk digest" <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
 Subject: Network cards and Win98SE
 Message-ID: <4F49BB9C660F44B8B67371D3BAB651AA at CharlesDellLap>
 Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed; charset="iso-8859-1";
 	reply-type=original

 I have tried for two days to get wireless networking running on my old PC
 under Win 98SE, so I can use PUTR without a separate partition or boot. XP
 is on an 8.4 GB drive. 98SE is on an older 540 MB drive.

 There are two network cards (a Netgear WPN311 with Atheros chipset, and
 an
 Encore ENWLI-G2 with Realtek 8185 chip) and neither will work with
 Win98SE.
 I have tried the manufacturer's drivers, Atheros drivers, Realtek drivers...
...
  none of it works. The Realtek driver installs but
gives a fault in RUNDLL32.
...

 Netgear's website claims that the WPN311 can run under 98SE and later.
 Some
 sources for that driver package say it starts with XP. Although I would tend
...
  to believe the manufacturer...
 The same Netgear card in the same motherboard was working correctly with
 the
 XP drive.

 I even did a fresh install of 98SE. Then installed the WPN311 software, then
...
  the card. Windows says the card is installed and
working properly.
 But the Netgear utility won't run (hangs, Task Manager showing wlancfg5 not
...
  responding). That's usually because it can't
see the card.

 Searching the net including various forums from years ago hasn't helped.
 So I'm about to give up. Wasted enough hours on this. Back to XP with a DOS
...
  partition for running PUTR.
 Unless someone has a better idea :)

 thanks
 Charles 
Hi Charles,

About 5 years ago I spent way too much time trying to sort out a PC platform
that would meet my needs for disk imaging (ImageDisk), PUTR, network file
transfers and ISA-based EPROM programmers.  I eventually settled on a
Pentium II bare motherboard, AHA-1522A SCSI card (for its floppy controller
which supports single-density disks), CF card as a hard drive, FDADAP
adapter (for 8" drives), a generic ISA network interface card, MSDOS 6.22,
Norton Commander and Michael Brutman's mTCP package.

With this setup I can run PUTR and ImageDisk without any Windows-related
issues. File transfers to other computers are a breeze: mTCP includes an FTP
server and I just run FileZilla on my Windows machines to connect to the
MSDOS machine.  Alternatively I can power down the MSDOS machine, and plug
the CF card into a USB adapter and copy files that way instead.

I appreciate these suggestions won't help if you need to have Win98 on the
same machine for other reasons.

Malcolm.