Hey friends, this is my first Vogons post! I just wanted to say initially that I love the community, have been a long time lurker, and only just recently decided it was time to build some actual retro hardware.

So, onward to my question. I have an ASUS P5KPL-AM SE motherboard (tried copying the PhilsComputerLab Youtube video) and I’m having a great time so far. My PCIx GPU works great, my PCI sound card also works great, for the most part everything seems to work. However, it was pretty tricky to find a driver that would work with the onboard NIC. It’s a RealTek driver (I’ll have to chase down what the actual driver is when I’m in front of my computer in case anyone is interested).

So, when I boot the computer, I manually go into the device manager and enable the device, and then am able to surf the internet. The strange part is that I need to remember to go manually disable the device before powering off my computer. If I _fail_ to do that step, then at the next boot, I’ll get the blue screen VFAT error, and will need to boot into safe mode to go disable the device.

My question is, how can I leave the NIC enabled and boot as normal? Is it possible? Should I just count my blessings an onboard NIC works at all? 😀

Thanks! I’m fairly new to troubleshooting Win98SE issues, so please bare with me.