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24072
February 20th, 2009 13:00
Dell Inspiron 2500 NIC (Ethernet) facility? - Following Reinstall
I've had to do a reinstall of W2K on a Dell Inspiron 2500, but I am stumped when trying to establish ethernet connectivity. There is an ethernet socket but it does not activate when plugging in the network cable, and there is no sign of it in devices, or indeed when I query the BIOS. Despite the presence of the ethernet socket, the BIOS simply says "Modem" under attached devices. I am now wondering if this ethernet socket is just that, a socket, but there is no hardware card or device actually to enable inside the laptop.
Can anyone help with this?
Certainly there seem to be no compatible drivers on the Dell download site, except possible one, for an Actiontec combi modem/ethernet device. However, the installed modem these drivers install gets a yellow exclamation mark in device manager, and when I try to install the "ethernet" side of this device, no compatible hardware is listed during the install.
So, in effect, is the bad news that this ethernet socket in the latpop is effectively a "dummy" with no compatible hardware inside that can actually be activated?
Anyway any thoughts on this pesky problem?!
Paul
Larry R
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1.7K Posts
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February 20th, 2009 13:00
The RJ45 port is there for systems that have the combo mini-PCI card. I know the cabling is there in the bay on the bottom of the system to connect to either card (one connection for modem, one for network).
One option is to get either the combo card or a 3Com Mini-PCI network (or combo) card from one of the equivalent Latitude systems (CPX series, if I remember correctly from back when I first started at Dell 6 or 7 years ago). If nothing else you could use a PCMCIA or USB network adapater (assuming you can find a Win2K driver for a USB NIC).
Larry R
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1.7K Posts
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February 20th, 2009 13:00
The full list of Win2K drivers for the Inspiron 2500 are:
What network adapter are you using? Looking at the system specs it does not appear to have an integrated NIC. Instead it uses either a Mini-PCI (Actiontec Win-) modem, or Mini-PCI (Actiontec JClass 10/100 LAN + 56k) modem/network combo card.
cprelude
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February 20th, 2009 13:00
Hi Larry...Great suggestions, many thanks! The USB NIC sounds neat and cool for what I need. I guess I need to ask the inevitable, which is most of these will be USB 2 these days, and are they backwards compatible with the USB 1 on the 2500?
Paul
cprelude
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February 20th, 2009 13:00
Hi Larry, thanks for getting back to me. I am not using a network adapter, unfortunately, because I can't see one! You are right it seems to have two options for communications and I only have the modem option, not the modem/network combo option. But the network jack is a bit misleading, as one would expect to be leading somewhere. But I don't think it does!
I may need to take a look underneath the case and see what is going on to confirm my hunch.
Paul
Larry R
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1.7K Posts
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February 20th, 2009 14:00
Others might be able to answer for specific units, but as far as I know it would be individually determined (e.g., did the company making them set it up for USB 1 compatibility).