I don't know about 2000, but I have used a USB NIC with Windows 98 and it worked perfectly fine.

Do you know what model nic you used?

You will be limited to 12mbps speeds. Use a PCI NIC. They are easy to find, and probably cheaper than their USB counterparts.

Out of PCI ports, if you read the OP you would have seen that. (don't take that the wrong way, not trying to be rude)
I ether have to lose a sound ard or a voodoo2 to put a nic in the system and I'm not pulling one of those ever time I need to get the system online.
And 12mbs is fine by me. I only have a 15mb service anyway.

I guess what I'm getting at is do they play well on older systems with usb 1.1? Can they be used? and so on.
I seen a lot of them for sale online and can't find much on them about legacy OS support.

EDIT:
Found one for 3$ that supports 2k and 9x I'll give it a try.
If anyone has anything more to add to this please do so.

I don't think there's much to be added except to point out that you can sometimes find combo PCI cards that have multiple functions. I actually found one that's USB, Firewire and Ethernet, but with that particular card I couldn't read the part number of the ethernet chipset so I dunno if that card would've had 9x or 2k network drivers (the USB chipset on that card was a Via 6212 which should work in 9x and 2k). Maybe you can find a PCI combo card that has multiple functions you'd use and thus allow you to get more devices on PCI. It may be harder to find a combo card that works for your situation (including OS support) so it might not be as good a solution for you. But it's a possibility that you could look into if you wanted to.

I don't think a combo card will work for me.
I have 2 voodoo2's an isa awe 64 gold and a high end scsi raid card in the system. I don't see there being any combo cards that would work like that. Maybe scsi card and nic, but Id like to keep the scsi card I have.

Personally I'd upgrade to XP, it opens up a lot of options, but if you really want to stick to 2k, you could try to get something Realtek RTL8150 based. It's USB 1.1, and supports W2K among other older OS:es. Generally Realtek's drivers are absolutely lovely too, they're small, never causes any problems, and contains no bloated manager apps, etc.

If I remember right, it was a Belkin something or other - I don't know which model exactly.

keenmaster486 wrote:

If I remember right, it was a Belkin something or other - I don't know which model exactly.

There's little point to discussing a consumer brand w/o a specific model number because that could be anything underneath. All brands like that do is buy an existing design using an existing PCB with an existing chipset and just slap their name on it.

What matters for OS support is what chip is inside and a brand like Belkin don't stick to one supplier. They'll use anything that they think will make them the most money at any given time (or, in general, whatever has good availability to them and is good enough). If you did have a specific model number, you could find out who made the chip inside, and then you could be fairly certain that any other product with the same chip should have the same compatibility.