[WinMac] Virtual PC with Asante 10/100 card

Bobby Roe(bobbyroe[at]rcn.com)
Wed, 26 Aug 1998 17:08:01 -0400

Has anyone had success with Virtual PC and the Asante 10/100 PCI card?

Here's the environment:

- 9500/132, 64MB RAM, VM on at 80 MB, 2 GB HD with 1.4 GB free
- Virtual PC (Windows 95) 2.1 (just downloaded updater today)
- Windows NT Server 4.0 SP3 domain

The Symptoms:

- Within 2 to 5 minutes of starting active use of the network
connections, variable ?possibly? depending on the number of files
accessed across the network, the network connections will cease to
respond.

- Checking NET USE at a command prompt still show the connections as
live, but trying to return even a DIR of any of the connected drives
fails ('Extended Error 53' in command prompt).

- I've tried loading the Asante driver in the Control Panel Network icon,
leaving the DEC 21041 driver (which is what VPC emulates) active. No
difference.

- I removed the DEC driver, leaving just the Asante driver loaded, and
this doesn't even produce an initial connection to the network.

- I've tried running in a command prompt mode only (F8-6 on starting
Windows 95), but that produces the same (failure after random interval)
problem.

I've removed protocols we aren't using (Netware), leaving just the ones
we are using (NetBeui and TCP/IP). No difference.

The Real Problem:

- We've been using SoftWindows for 2+ years with relatively few problems.

- We want to move to 100Mb networking. We already have the switch
installed, our servers converted, and the Asante cards installed in 20
workstations.

- SoftWindows (any version) doesn't support third-party Ethernet cards,
only the Apple (built-in) interface.

- Virtual PC does support third-party Ethernet cards, according to
Connectix, but apparently only to some degree less than we are trying to
use.

The Questions:

- Has anyone had success with Virtual PC and the Asante 10/100 PCI card?

- Does anyone have any additional troubleshooting steps I might try?

- Does anyone want to help us rewrite (to Win32 and Mac) the DOS-based
application that is the reason we're stuck in this situation in the first
place? :-)

I'll summarize in a day or two.

TIA,

Bobby Roe Creative Graphics, Inc.
Systems Manager Allentown, PA
                                 610.266.1670

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This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b2 on Wed Aug 26 1998 - 14:13:21 PDT