Pcmcia Wifi installation fails

[ohthinker]

Hi, I hope someone has seen this before. I'm stumped.

Trying to get my T20 back on the road, as a gift for a friend (mostly for lightweight web browsing, email, and the like). I'm using bits from my surplus drawer. The machine originally came with Win98SE and that's what I'm using, since it has a license. (I know, it's an obsolete OS, but a. that's what it was born with; and b. what more do you really need for this kind of use?)

Anyway, all is well until I fit a Wifi card in the PCMCIA socket. Then the machine crashes. I've tried two different 3com cards, a 3CRWE62092B and a 3crshpw196, and a US Robotics USR2410. (These are all older 11mbps cards.)

The New Hardware Wizard opens. I drop the driver CD into the cdrom, point the wizard at it, and all seems fine. It reads the driver scripts, loads some stuff from the Windows installation directory (c:\win98), thinks things over, chugs the disk a few times, and then - silence. One more little bump of the disk and then everything just stops. The Wizard dialog is still displayed, but the Finish button never appears. There's no mouse or keyboard action and the infamous 3-finger salute has no effect. The only escape is to hold down the power switch until the computer shuts off.

The machine seems fine upon rebooting, but inserting the Wifi card just crashes it (without the Wizard this time).

I don't think it's the PCMCIA hardware, because it works fine with a USB2 PCMCIA card which I have here. I'll admit I haven't tried a lot of other PCMCIA cards yet.

It crashes with a full Win98SE installation, including all the applicable IBM/Lenovo updates. It crashes with just the Win98SE supplemental files installed in c:\win98 as directed. It crashes with a fresh Win98SE installation without any of the IBM supplements. It crashes with Win98SE and the unofficial Win98SE service pack from http://exuberant.ms11.net/, both with and without the IBM Win98 supplements.

Keeping count? I've reloaded Windows at least 5 times now, and I'm running out of time before Christmas! Can anybody think of what I might be forgetting to do, or doing wrong?

Many thanks for any suggestions you might have.

PS - I *am* able to get the built-in Ethernet port working with the IBM/Lenovo driver, just not the Wifi.

[RealBlackStuff]

See if you can find other drivers on the web. The ones on the CD might be too old.
Try installing them while in Safe Mode. Hit F8 repeatedly at bootup till you get the menu.
Try if W98 has built-in generic wifi drivers.

[ohthinker]

Thanks for the response. I cheated and loaded a copy of Win2K. Works fine now. Not really a solution, but a usable workaround.

Bugs me, though. The same wifi cards were perfectly happy with Win98SE on the 760EL. Why not on the T20? It's a puzzle.

[JBUK]

This is probably too late for you now but I use WiFi on W98 T20s.
They always crash if the card is inserted with the o/s booted.
I have to power up with the card already inserted.

It is ideal if the card driver CD has a setup exe to run beforehand because with W98 you need a configuration utility loaded as well to set up the security and to get it to work at all with your router or access point.

Anyway W2K is much easier to set up networks of any sort with so you have found a good solution.