okay, bought a "netgear 10\100 32-bit Cardbus ethernet card" for this Compaq Presario 1220 (200mhz, older) window's won't detect it at all (plug and pray) and I've tried manually installing the correct drivers for it and it still won't recognize it... it fits in the port and all but I still can't get it to be recognized. I am not sure if somethings messed up with my PCMIA (something like that) controller... or the card is 32-bit bus and since the laptop is older, the port may be 16-bit and be causing an incompatibility... I'm just trying to get the card recognized by the computer, I don't have any network cables plugged into it yet.. any ideas? thanks

You're gonna have to check out Device Manager (right click on My Computer and select properties). Once in Device Manager, find the entry for PCMCIA and expand it. There should be at least 2 entries in there (one for each PCMCIA slot) and maybe a PCMCIA controller that manages the 2 PCMCIA slots. If everything looks normal (such as no exclamation points or no red X's), then go into Control Panel and double click on PCMCIA icon. That should start the 32bit setup which should enable the PCMCIA slots. After doing this, Windows will require you to shut down the PC. Once you fire up the PC again, the card in the PCMCIA slot should be picked up by PNP.

1. Make sure you're using Win95B or above. Win95A will not work for a 32bit PCMCIA card. 2. No PCMCIA icon in your system tray? Probably not set up. Make sure you have the PCMCIA socket setup: Control panel, new hardware, list, pcmcia socket. 3. The little PCMCIA socket icon should appear in your system tray at the bottom right of your screen, near the time display. The icon indicates it is always waiting for a card to be inserted. 4. Insert your PC Card, your computer should try to load drivers for it.

Okay, I tried doing steps 1-4 and I did the wizard thing... but I'm still not getting that PCMCIA icon in the taskbar... I even went into device manager and removed the one that was there (cirus logic something or other, when I remove it, windows auto detects it as that so I leave it), but I tried using a compaq one but it replaces it with the cirrus logic one again... okay, and I tried the real mode drivers thing in that wizard, and it has only "setver.exe" and "abs_16 (pretty sure that's my sound card)" So I don't think that's the prob... although, I have another problem that it may be linked to... I have a "unknown device" in device manager... I've removed it but everytime I boot up windows it keeps autodecting it as "unknown device" when window's starts.... it does it whether or not I have the ethernet card in... maybe linked to that... okay, any more suggestions, I think these are getting me a lot closer, thanks