[plug] Sound or Network Card

[Nick Bannon]

On Thu, Sep 23, 1999 at 04:40:41PM +0800, Jamie Moir wrote:
> On Thu, 23 Sep 1999, Nick Bannon wrote:
[...]
> that's a toughy, i have 12 netgears at work, some are real decs, some are
> liteon clones, they all had the same model number, they are all quite well
> behaved, even under windows heh

Wow. ::-)

I consistently have real problems installing recent network cards under
Windows. Win95 OSR2, cheap crappy cards and good name brand cards. All
PnP, all with latest downloaded drivers, they just require an inordinate
amount of fiddling to get running. Sometimes nothing I do works and then
I move it from one slot to another, it magically Plugs and Prays again
and then it works. All through this, the vendor diagnostics program
insists everything is fine even though nothing else will have a bar of it.

If I do a Linux floppy boot just to test the hardware it invariably
works perfectly.

<sigh>

[...]
> > The 3Coms are apparently very good too, and the recent announcements
> > about them opening up some GPL'ed Linux drivers makes me want to look
> > at them closer, but they're not cheap by comparison to the Dlinks and
> > at least some of the tulips. (~$150 tax inc? for a 3c509)
							 ^^^ argh
3c905 (or 3c905B or 3c905C). Always easy to slip up on those 3Com model
numbers. ::-)

> ive heard very mixed reports about reliability under linux with these
> cards, id personally be quite cautious about touching one

I've seen a few very very solid production servers using them with no
worries at all. Mind you, same thing goes for the tulips and at half
the price, the choice is clear. ::-)

Nick.

-- 
  Nick Bannon  | "I made this letter longer than usual because
nick at it.net.au | I lack the time to make it shorter." - Pascal