John Bartow
john at winhaven.net
Tue Sep 13 08:12:18 CDT 2005
Tina, Oh my! That was a lot of work for a wireless card! Glad to see you got it working though. John B. -----Original Message----- From: dba-tech-bounces at databaseadvisors.com [mailto:dba-tech-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Tina Norris Fields Hi All, and especially John Bartow, who tried to help - I have my issue solved sort of - what I learned might be useful to someone else, so here goes: As I originally described, I had installed the Win98SE drivers for a D-Link DWL-G520 wireless adapter card, and could not get a connection. I learned that the card wants IRQ7, while Windows kept assigning it IRQ 9 or 10 or 11, depending on which PCI slot I put it in - and Windows would not permit me to change the IRQ setting. After working with several tech people at D-Link, I finally reached a very knowledgeable fellow, named Oscar Novarro (he's the one who looked up the IRQ requirements for this card - 7 and 22 - mine go only to 15). My HP LJ4500 is on IRQ 7. I considered uninstalling the printer, then installing the D-Link card, then reinstalling the printer to see if that sequence would get the card into IRQ7 - but, that printer wasn't the easiest to install the first time, so I really didn't want to do that unless I had to. We worked out three ideas: 1) Find an upgrade for my Award BIOS to maybe let me change the IRQ 2) Swap the matching card from the nearly matching machine where it was all working just fine - see if that card worked in this machine, and see if my current card worked in the other machine. 3) Use a lower-demand card, the DWL-520, that would require less of my system than the "G" card. I immediately did idea number 1 - and that was something of a nightmare, too, because the flash memory BIOS reader and updater software was somewhat ahead of the instruction literature, so, things on the screen did not match their descriptions in the instructions. And, I had a temporarily completely inoperative machine. But, I went back through everything and sorted out what had to be what, regardless of the failure to match, and got my machine back, running the new BIOS just fine. That did not help the DWL-G520 issues. I really didn't want to do number 2 because the machine that was working fine is the one my father is using. It is working nicely, he doesn't much like being inconvenienced, I didn't want to upset that applecart and maybe find myself with yet another machine not working - so that was going to be a last resort effort. The DWL-520 is no longer manufactured, but there are still some around (and they will be supported until April of 2008) - so I ordered a couple. They arrived yesterday evening as I was making supper. Yes, I put supper in the oven and went to install the new card. This one works - first try. So, now I have it working fine, using a lower level card. My situation is repaired. But, I still don't know why the "G" card worked in one Win98SE machine and not in its sister machine. From earlier tech discussions, it really does not appear that the card is bad, even though I hesitate to try it in my dad's machine - so I still have a mystery. Anyway, there's my story and my sort of solution - new BIOS, new card. Best, Tina