Hack 17 Configure Network Cards 
Give your network card the resources it needs
to get and keep your LAN and Internet traffic flowing
smoothly.
Network cards are another
enhancement to PCs that had to be squeezed in to the limits of old
legacy I/O systems. Because networking usually requires a fast,
steady stream of data, it is important that network interface cards
have unique and exclusive use of
address and IRQ resources. Symptoms of
conflicts include the inability to obtain a network address or log on
to a server, or poor data transfer performance.
The most successful implementations of early 8- and 16-bit network
cards in practice used addresses 280 or 340 and IRQ5 (8-bit systems)
or IRQ10 (16-bit systems), depending on the presence or absence of a
sound card using IRQ5.
Determining the presence, type, and configuration of older network
cards is not well supported in most diagnostic and system information
programs. Instead you may have to rely on reading the jumper settings
or using a configuration program meant specifically for your network
adapter.
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If you need Gigabit Ethernet (1000BaseT), you
should use a motherboard that has it built in. If you install a
1000BaseT PCI card, it will likely saturate the PCI bus, leaving no
bandwidth for other PCI cards. Onboard 1000BaseT uses a separate bus
to talk to the CPU and memory.
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Today, with PCI
and Plug and Play, you seldom have to concern yourself with these
issues. Nevertheless, knowing the commonly available configurations
is useful should you ever have to configure the drivers and software
for a LAN card to work in
DOS, which often cannot use PCI net cards
because the vendors may not provide DOS drivers for them.
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Although well published in IBM specifications, address 300 was
"reserved" for use by IBM and
prototype devices and recognized as such in many versions of BIOS.
IBM even offered a plug-in card that used address 300 for others to
develop new products around.
Older ISA network cards may be set for address
300, which can cause problems for some older applications. Avoid
using address 300 for anything.
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