While most of my problem is fixed, the IRQ issue still does remain, so I
will answer some of what you have said here and see if there is still hope.

I did try changing the slot he card was in.  There are only two PCI slots on
the MB, and both are shared with an ISA slot.  When I originally installed
the NIC the modem was in slot 2.  I moved it to slot 1 (thinking slot 2 was
not shared because I couldn't see the bottom of the MB with the modem in the
way) and put the NIC in slot 2.  The problem is, the modem is one of the
devices that is sharing IRQ 11 with the NIC.  The other is the video, which
is on-board.  Gotta love Compaq!

As far as the reason for using the Homefree NICs, the customer did not want
to run CAT5 cable through his house.  He was pretty insistant on a
non-intrusive networking solution.  The actual network speed of the cards is
pretty good.  Moving files is pretty fast as well as shared printing.  File
upload speeds are very good as well.  It's just downloading content from the
internet that was slow.  This issue is fixed, however.

What I'm thinking of doing is this.  Remove the NIC and the modem, reserve
IRQ 11 in the BIOS so just the video can have it, then re-installing the NIC
and modem.  Does this sound like I'm going down the right road?  Thanks.

Kyle

From: "Tom Connolly" <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, June 22, 2000 1:39 PM
Subject: Re: [PCBUILD] Networking and IRQ Problem


> Try this,
> On win95/98, if you're running PCI PnP cards, I've not had good luck with
> changing IRQ's. One trick that I have learned is that if you have a
conflict
> and you want to try to change one of the IRQ's on the PnP device, change
> what slot it's in. The bios will see it as a different card and give it a
> different IRQ. Remove the card from windows before doing this though.
>
> Also... look and see if there's either a jumper or software utility to
take
> the card out of PnP mode and manually set it. I honestly prefer manually
> configurable hardware over PnP hardware. If you know what you're doing, it
> saves a lot of headaches in the longrun..
>
> Can I ask why you used the Homefree cards instead of regular NICs? I've
not
> seen sterling reviews of those systems. Regular twisted pair phone line is
> not up to Cat 5 standards. I'm not surprised you are not getting great
> performance. I assume performace on the ICS server is good.
>
> Anyway,changing IRQs depends on the network card, most will accept
multiple
> IRQs, so you should be able to manually change it. If you hose it, delete
> the NIC from Device Mgr and run Add New Hardware to redetect it.
>
> TC

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