I don't like Vista, but I want to learn how to use it and troubleshoot it. Therefore, I installed an nLite version of Vista Ultimate on a Pentium 3 500MHz machine I recently picked up at a yard sale. It's slow as a snail, but not unusable. I'm wanting to get an old ISA Network Card to work with Vista. I know I could just go and get a PCI wireless NIC or PCI ethernet card but getting this ISA card to work would be a nice challenge. As you probably know, Microsoft is phasing out support for ISAPNP cards. But according to this page, the support is still there if needed. The problem is that this page is so vague that I can hardly understand it. It talks at the bottom of a "custom INF File" and gives an example. How would I go about creating this INF file and what would I put in it? How would I go about putting a "reference" in the device's INF file? It's all vague to me.

I can't find a reference to a "unknown device" in the Device Manager.

The NIC works flawlessly on Windows XP but I'd like to figure out how to get it to work for Vista as well. If I could have any help on this I'd really be grateful. Thanks.

WinSimple Software

Did you try to install the drivers as you did in XP?

"Best Practices", Event viewer, host file, perfmon, are in my top 10

Thanks jefro for the reply. XP automatically installed the NIC for me so I didn't have to do anything. Could there be a way to get the XP driver and use it? If so, how? Thanks again so much.

WinSimple Software

Go to the NIC adapter's web site for the current drivers. Try also the computer maker's web site for drivers.

"Best Practices", Event viewer, host file, perfmon, are in my top 10

Thanks again, unfortunately the drivers weren't on the CNetUSA website. The card is real old, from around 1993 I think. I pulled it out of a 100MHz / 4MB of RAM PC which was still working when I took it apart. Oh well.

I've tried several other drivers I found from Driverguide that were for 2000/XP but they didn't work either.

Another reason to not like Vista!

WinSimple Software

To make Vista faster for this project set it to "Adjust for Best Performance" under Performance settings. You lose all the pretty visuals but it's a lot faster.

Thanks Brim, I tried that and it does help!

WinSimple Software

You mean you didn't do that already Rayburn? Did Aero work on your P3 500? ;)

I was hoping it would, but the video card that's in there is an AGP nVidia TNT2 16MB card. I don't guess it works because Aero isn't listed to select from. I heard of a way to hack it, but haven't been able to get it to work yet. I've heard of it being done with a P3 500MHz, but what P3 of that kind would support a graphics card capable of Aero?

WinSimple Software

There is a way to get close to the aero effects (no transparency and none of the fancy animations) using the hack you probably mention, it does work because I managed to get it going on my ex's laptop which had Vista Home Basic.

Even so, you could probably get a 64/128MB AGP card, and shove it in there to get the effects - just guesswork here, but I don't see why an old FX 5200 128MB wouldn't cope.

Thanks! I'll keep that in mind. The hard drive just failed in this machine so I'll have to get a new one soon before I can do anything with this.

WinSimple Software

Good luck! I always liked pushing old machines with the latest operating systems to see how far they could go! I saw screenshots once of XP running on a 486 though, can't say I've ever gone that far haha. I had no idea Vista even saw the ISA bus anymore so this is all very interesting.

Oh I love pushing old systems to the limit as well. I installed XP on an old 166MHz Pentium 1 with 64MB of RAM. It really wasn't bad after unneeded services were disabled. I even had the themes turned on!

WinSimple Software