First post, by Devil996
I've never forgotten how traumatic and frustrating the first time I used networking on Windows 98 was in my youth. Despite this, I thought I'd do myself harm by repeating the experience 26 years later.
I remember how happy I was when I went out to buy a D-Link DFE 538-TX (when I die, one of the stupidest and most useless things I'll remember will be this model of card) to play Warcraft 3 with my roommate over LAN. Although it worked fine, that card introduced a 30-second latency when booting my lightning-fast K7 supercomputer at 700 MHz with Geffo2 GTS. A trauma I've never resolved or overcome, except by removing the card when I wasn't gaming.
When I found a 3Com on eBay a couple of days ago, I thought: It was an unlucky card, and I was ignorant... I can do it, they say 3Coms are the most reliable and compatible, I won't have any problems.
I installed the card, and without even inserting the drives, the computer crashes every time I restart it. It boots from power off, but every time I try to restart it, it crashes to a black screen with a flashing cursor.
I installed the drivers and it does the same, but this time it also crashes at shutdown. It crashes if I press Enter while facing the shutdown screen.
Hmmm, not great. 😀
I also noticed the annoying startup agent, which doesn't seem to be able to be disabled, although that's the least of my problems for now.
