Wrong forum. Ask old hardware and driver/configuration questions in Marvin. This forum is for old Windows games on modern systems. Marvin, the Paranoid Android

I say try a different network card to rule that out.

Even just pull the card and reinstall it a few times to get the contacts moving, clean and making good contact. I often have problems initially getting cards to work on older computers, simply because the slots have been sitting unused for decades and require a bit of movement to dislodge the surface corrosion.

Justin1091 wrote:

Today I started the PC and it froze at the 3.11 splash screen.

Hi, how long did you wait ?
I've encountered some pretty long boot times if the DHCP server wasn't found.
Maybe it'll boot up after a minute or so.

Moved.

canthearu wrote:

I say try a different network card to rule that out.

Even just pull the card and reinstall it a few times to get the contacts moving, clean and making good contact. I often have problems initially getting cards to work on older computers, simply because the slots have been sitting unused for decades and require a bit of movement to dislodge the surface corrosion.

True, I had this issue with many PCI cards. Yesterday I immediately booted to 98 and saw it was working fine. Today, it wasn't however, read below. I put a bit of contact cleaner on the card's PCI connection and brushed it with a toothbrush (this worked very well for me with other cards).

Jo22 wrote:

]Hi, how long did you wait ?
I've encountered some pretty long boot times if the DHCP server wasn't found.
Maybe it'll boot up after a minute or so.

Today it booted! Networking was fine. A couple of minutes later I rebooted the machine and I got a blue screen stating the DHCP server couldn't be contacted. This happened after ~1 minute waiting at the 3.11 splash screen. Yesterday I waited 5 minutes. Dismissing this message got me into Windows 3.11. I also tested in Windows 98, strange thing is I was browsing the internet on 98 and suddenly the PC lost it's connection. Winipcfg said it couldn't contact the DHCP server. I could ping localhost though, just nothing on the network. Tried a different cable also. LED's on the card were blinking though, and the PC's BIOS detected it.

So, you guys are both right. Something is wrong with the card probably, I have another one that *might* have been installed in this pc instead of this one previously. Maybe I swapped them accidently (they're both Realtek RTL8139D but PCB is a bit different), I'll try the other one tomorrow, maybe I put the suspected bad one in my Windows 7 PC and see what it does.
Thanks!

So it was the networking card. Everything works when I put the other RTL8139D in the PC, even the shutdown freezes are solved now (thought 32-bit disk access caused that but apparently it doesn't). Strange that the faulty card works fine in my Windows 7 PC though.

Anyway it's solved, thanks a lot!