Quoting Adam Borowski ([email protected]): > Well, about that... Not so long ago I helped a relative by installing > Redmontware. It was a long, arduous process, during which I had to fetch > and copy in drivers for six pieces of hardware. Most of those couldn't be > even found on their manufacturer's website -- I had to scour some random > seedy webpages.
Some of the drivers, even those shipped _with_ Redmondware, were notoriously so buggy that you could seldom make them function at all. I believe it was 1998 that I spent a week at a client site in Portland, Oregon, and among other things was putting 3Com 3C905TX PCI NICs into workstations running MS-Windows 98. ISTR that I had access to the NDIS driver both from the OS and directly from 3Com -- and the problem was that, about 19 times out of 20, Device Manager showed the driver to be non-functional after you assembled the network stack. So, you deleted the entire network stack, maybe waved a dead chicken or two, reinstalled the NIC driver and network stack again, and re-tested. Repeat until it suddenly works. Nobody knew of a better workaround, and impliedly OEMs who shipped a working configuration with 3C905TX NICs had gone through the same madness until a test box worked, and then disk-imaged that fluke success for mass replication. _______________________________________________ Dng mailing list [email protected] https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
