Me again.

The first problem began after I installed a D-Link ethernet card. It now takes a minute or two for my computer to boot, when before it took about 20-30seconds. During this time my hard drive light is not even flashing. What's going on? Is there anything I can do to get rid of this problem short of removing the card?

The second, and last, problem is after I installed the card driver and windows 98 did it's thing (installed some network stuff ie, dial-up adapters, tcp/ip protocols, etc.) I found that, when browsing the internet, it would take a massively long time to load pages every now and then. I thought that this might be the ethernet card, so I connected using my old 56K dial-up modem. I get the same problem. The little computers in the taskbar stop lighting up for a while then abruptly start working. What this leads me to believe is that the problem is not neccesarily the ethernet card's fault, but probably originated from the network stuff that windows needed to install in order to make the ethernet card work. I was wondering if anyone nows of any patches, fixes, whatever, that I can try in order to fix this second annoying problem. Without chucking my ethernet card.

Computer stats:

Computer stats:

ASUS CUV4X VIA chipset mobo
Pentium III 800
128SDRAM PC-100
Maxtor 40GB hard drive
GeForce DDR 32MB video card
SoundBlaster Live! MP3+ sound card
D-Link DFE-530TX ethernet card
Regular old 56K dial-up modem
Windows 98 OS

Thanks for the help, email me if you need any more information.

Ethernet cards do add some time to boot up, yours sounds a bit excessive though. One thing to check is to have only the network protocols installed that you really need. Another thing that I found that helped was to place shortcuts to all the comps on my home network in my start menu.

In your situation I would first try removing all the associated software and hardware and then reinstalling it including drivers and protocols

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When in doubt search on Google

I'll try that, thanks. Do you have any idea why internet pages cease to load due to a lack of modem activity, then, as if the modem starts to realize what its made for, abruptly kicks in? See my first post for any details you may need. Thanks

I've got the "+" (WOL) version of that board. Besides just having the TCP/IP protocol installed, you might try assigning it a static address (not DHCP).

I do recall slower boots when I first started using ethernet; things work fine now, my D-Link cable firewall/router functions as a DHCP server.

I don't know why your downloads would be adversely affected.