Ethernet card won't work, have good drivers, Windows ME?

Question

I've tried to different ethernet cards from 2 different companies. They both show up just fine in device manager, yet i can't get online with firefox, IE, or with avg antivirus update. Please help me to get my realtek ethernet card to work. I removed all other PCI devices and moved the ethernet card to pci slot 1. In Bios, what irq should i reserve for it? What block should I reserve? what about the latency (it's at 40H)? Should I set it as master, should i enable option rom scan? Which upper memory blocks should i reserve for it? How can I get this card to work?

Thanks! I manually entered an ip in the TCP/IP control panel network settings and reset. Then in command prompt, when i tried iprelease and renew, it says media status disconnected and of course doesn't have an ip address or anything, but it says it's connected in device manager.

Answer 1

Well you shouldn't have to set ANY bios settings for an add on card. If you did you may mess it up, go back and set all that to auto!

Then take a look at a few more things on the Computer Control Panel. You should be set (in network settings) to get an IP automatically and DNS should be set to automatic.

Connect the ethernet cable to your modem or router. And restart your computer. Once that is done check to see if you get an IP. On ME I think its start and run winipcfg it should show you a vaild IP. Since I don't know how your connected I cant tell you exactly what it will look like but on a router it should be something like 192.168.x.x with a subnet and a gateway -- if its direct to a Modem it will be something like 200.42.x.x etc (this can be nearly any numbers)
If it shows 169.x.x.x or 0.0.0.0 you are not getting an IP and may have to manually set one or reset the Modem/Router.

If your network connection shows to be OK then it saw the cable -- you can test just unplug - it should show "network cable unplugged" when you connect it should show connected.

If the system shows the drivers installed you should work.