Last year, I found a 7" PC Compatibility Card at ebay and plugged it into my 9600. This machine already had a ATI 7000, a G3 upgrade running at 450 MHz a couple of DIMM sticks and a Sonnet Presto Gigabit PCI network card.
Initally, the PC Compatibility card had a 4MB DIMM installed, which was fine for DOS, but not enough for serious Win9x. After buying several DIMMs, most of them were not working, except for one labeled 16 MB, but showed up with 8MB. More than before, but still not a pleasure. Earlier this year, I found a sealed Kingston DIMM with 32 MB, which did work in the card. Since then, memory was not a problem. What drove me nuts, was, that I was not able to get networking running on the PC side: It did not matter, whether I used the onboard ethernet controller or the added PCI Gigabit controler - the PC side did not send anything.
Yesterday I made another attempt: I tried all available images of Win95b in German and US version, also Win98. But no success. Finally I decided to do a clean install of (German) Win95. But still no networking. Whilst rebooting the PC side, I stumbled across the message, that the NDIS driver could not find its counterpart on the Mac side. Still, it gave me no clue, why this was the case. As a last option, I decided to pull the Gigabit PCI network card and to try with only the onboard ethernet in the machine. Whilst reconfiguring the Mac control panels for AppleTalk and TCP/IP, I saw, that the onboard ethernet controlers name had changed from "Ethernet (integrated)" to simply "Ethernet" (the name of the PCI controler was something like "Ethernet slot #2").
After rebooting the Mac and restarting Win95, Windows booted without a error message. Finally, I was able to ping devices in my network and was able to access webpages from the PC side with Netscape 4.8.
My theory/conclusion is:
When having a dedicated network card installed in addition to the onboard one, the interface name changes from "Ethernet" to "Ethernet (integrated)" and as a consequence, the network driver (on the PC side or on the Mac side) does not find the Mac sides "PC Network Extension". When the PCI card is removed, the interface name changes back to "Ethernet" and things find their counterparts and the queues get connected.
Just to let others know of this experience and possibly be open for comments.
Initally, the PC Compatibility card had a 4MB DIMM installed, which was fine for DOS, but not enough for serious Win9x. After buying several DIMMs, most of them were not working, except for one labeled 16 MB, but showed up with 8MB. More than before, but still not a pleasure. Earlier this year, I found a sealed Kingston DIMM with 32 MB, which did work in the card. Since then, memory was not a problem. What drove me nuts, was, that I was not able to get networking running on the PC side: It did not matter, whether I used the onboard ethernet controller or the added PCI Gigabit controler - the PC side did not send anything.
Yesterday I made another attempt: I tried all available images of Win95b in German and US version, also Win98. But no success. Finally I decided to do a clean install of (German) Win95. But still no networking. Whilst rebooting the PC side, I stumbled across the message, that the NDIS driver could not find its counterpart on the Mac side. Still, it gave me no clue, why this was the case. As a last option, I decided to pull the Gigabit PCI network card and to try with only the onboard ethernet in the machine. Whilst reconfiguring the Mac control panels for AppleTalk and TCP/IP, I saw, that the onboard ethernet controlers name had changed from "Ethernet (integrated)" to simply "Ethernet" (the name of the PCI controler was something like "Ethernet slot #2").
After rebooting the Mac and restarting Win95, Windows booted without a error message. Finally, I was able to ping devices in my network and was able to access webpages from the PC side with Netscape 4.8.
My theory/conclusion is:
When having a dedicated network card installed in addition to the onboard one, the interface name changes from "Ethernet" to "Ethernet (integrated)" and as a consequence, the network driver (on the PC side or on the Mac side) does not find the Mac sides "PC Network Extension". When the PCI card is removed, the interface name changes back to "Ethernet" and things find their counterparts and the queues get connected.
Just to let others know of this experience and possibly be open for comments.
