Networking old PC's Deal is this : 3 laptops and 2 desktops (all on windows XP, with linksys wireless adapters) all working fine on a wireless G network off a Linksys Wireless router....... however... one of my housemates is running a crap old pentium 2 366 machine with windows 98 ..... ive installed a network card on it and I was hoping to be able to just plug it in to the router with a crossover cable and be done with it..... but when I tried doing that the computer doesnt even recognize the router or the connection. I know the network card works and I know the drivers are correct.... I cant think of anything else to do....?
well its just a 2 metre long rj45 cable.... straight from the network card to one of the 4 ports on the back of my router....? I have set the IP to be detected automatically...no joy tho
Crossover cable is not the right cable to use for PC > Router (Well it's a swich that you will be plugging it into actually but that doesn't matter), you need a Straight Through (Patch) cable. Put the two ends together and check that the wires are in the same order on both ends. Is the network card installed properly? Dont' forget, you have to install drivers manually on Windows 98, it doesn't have such a handy driver database that comes bundled with XP. Check in Device Manager to make sure it is working properly.
Its a network card i dug out of my old computer, I also the original driver disk so I know the drivers are correct, the network card works because when I was installing it I kept getting alerts from my router saying that there was an unidentified IP joining the network. Its just getting the bastard computer working..... how do I get it to recognize the router and the connection?
have you tried pinging the router and other hosts? have you pinged your own network card to make sure it's not faulty? Also worth noting, this sort of thing needs DHCP to be enabled. Go to start > run type services.msc (duno if that will work on W98) Make sure the DHCP client is set to Started and Automatic. It would appear that you have connecivity so that is promising at least. Can you browse the network?
there is no "network" as such...... just 5 computers using the router as a wireless gateway to t'internet and this last computer is too shiaat to support wireless connectivity so the only option is to have it wired to the router, cos thats the only way it'll be able to share the internet connection. Upgrading to windows 2k would be a good idea, but I have no idea how it'll run on a pentium 2 366. So chris you reckon i should create a network between the rest of the PC's and then establish the connection to the internet thru that? How backwards compatible are XP home networks with older machines?
I may be going more daft, but I remember some problem to do with 98, XP and crossover cables... You may want to google it.
I should imagine that if the router is recognising that a new computer is trying to gain access, that the lights on the NIC will be flashing. If the computer is set to get IP addresses automatically, then it's likely that it will be in the range of the router, as you say, this is most likely to be the 192.168.X.X range. Again I would think that TCP/IP is installed if the router is recognising a connection. If there is an issue to do with crossover cables, theres nothing to worry about it cos you don't need to use one anyway. Try installing Win2k, the minimum requirements for it are only 133mhz/64MB RAM, so it should run without problems. Don't install XP though, it will curl up and die if you do You already have a network mate, all you have to do is make sure all the machines are on the same workgroup and you will be able to see them on the network and share files etc. I don't think there are any particular issues with Win98/XP Networking. Win98 was before my time though and I know very little about it.....dos commands etc are different in Win98.
Thnaks for all the input guys, the old piece of shit is now fully networked...... downside is......he's draining my bandwidth by looking at porn all day
