2 Pcmcia Nic's

[CDFiXER]

I nabbed a PCMCIA Kingston NIC awhile back on ebay for < $10 shipped(!) I do not remember the model but it is Freesco friendly, or at least it was when Lewis was looking for testers for the PCMCIA package. Come to think of it, it ran fairly cool. Hmm. IIRC, wasn't the original PCMCIA spec for 5V cards, and later on that was dropped to 3.3V? Maybe your laptop is feeding the cards the wrong voltage?

[Thasaidon]

Maybe your laptop is feeding the cards the wrong voltage?

Well, the old Xircom card I'm using is about as old as the laptop itself.
This card is also giving problems now and again, not just the newer Sweex (realtek) card...
But if this is a power issue... then I'm done because there is no way to change that on the laptop (not in BIOS anyway)...

[Thasaidon]

Problem solved!

The old Xircom card was a 16Bit card
The newer Sweex card was a 32Bit card.
So I guess the ancient laptop couldn't handle this, and the 32Bit card didn't revert to running in 16Bit mode.

I bought some identical 3Com 3CCFE574BT 16Bit 10/100 pcmcia adapters
and all seems to work just fine now.
The laptop has been running as my main Freesco (with 0.3. for about a week now.

So thanx for all the support guys,
as always, you are the best!