Unsolved
This post is more than 5 years old
16 Posts
0
1205
Probs installing new NIC in Vostro 460
A new customer of mine has a Vostro 460 of about 4 yrs age. The network card is running at 10 meg. These are due to be replaced in a month or so so I thought I would just drop in a separate network card in the interim.
The card shows up in the device manager and appears fine but a) no light shows on it when the cable is plugged in and b) does not work (obviously).
The card is a Startech ST1000SPEX2 card (PCIe card, 1Gb, x1) so I tried it in the first x1 slot next to the x16 slot on the motherboard.
Tried the usual reboots, tried to find a setting in BIOS for disabling the onboard NIC (did I miss it?) but ran out of time. Customer is 2 hours away with no remote support (soon to be rectified!).
Any suggestions? I am not primarily a hardware guy (database developer) but know my way around equipment - just need some suggestions to try. Someone suggested onboard jumpers but I did not think those were used much anymore.
RoHe
10 Elder
10 Elder
•
44.3K Posts
0
April 30th, 2016 20:00
BTW: Did you install the driver for the add-in NIC card, if it requires its own driver?
RoHe
10 Elder
10 Elder
•
44.3K Posts
0
April 30th, 2016 20:00
Yes, there is an option to disable the Onboard LAN Controller in BIOS setup (page 87).
And if the system was originally set up to boot from a network, you probably also need to disable the Onboard LAN Boot ROM.
Do you know that your add-in NIC is compatible with whatever version of PCI-e is implemented on the 460? The PC's docs don't specify what version of PCI-e is supported.
speedstep
9 Legend
9 Legend
•
47K Posts
1
May 3rd, 2016 12:00
GIGABIT Requires CAT6 cable. Cat3 and Cat5 may not work at all EVER. Cat6 has a higher signal-to-noise ratio, providing higher reliability and higher data rates for current and future applications. It also requires much less power per pair, meaning there is less chance for interference in cable bundles. Failure, likely due to the required Cat6 cabling.