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PCMCIA Network Card: What NIC to buy?

Hello Everyone,

I am looking at buying some PCMCIA Nics that will grab an IP address on bootup INSTEAD of during login to a Windows Operating System.

The recent PCMCIA Nics I have tried will not grab a NIC until after you login, which causes me problems getting laptops on my Windows 2003 Domain.

Any Suggestions or Thoughts??

Thanks

jhance

Ummm, _all_ network cards, when configured for DHCP (i.e. Obtain IP address automatically) will issue the request at boot time, NOT login time.

If your adapter is currently doing this, it's either broken from totally obsolete.

rid

I can only agree with the above. What cards are in use? You may want to take a look at what kinds of software is running on the machines in question, some freakish security measure that prevents DHCP requests until user profile is loaded or so?
/RID

knoxzoo

It's possible that the system isn't loading the PCMCIA adapter drivers until the boot is complete and a user logs on. A rather stupid thing for the manufacturer to do with the drivers, but some did it that way. If that's the case, it can't load the NIC until the PCMCIA is loaded.

Have you tried USB devices?

rid

I just tried booting into windows on a laptop with a PCMCIA NIC (wireless). The link didn't even come up until I did a login. Seems I was a bit premature in my comment. Perhaps this is due to some processes being started for a certain user instead of being system-level processes and this could possibly depend on how drivers are designed. Guesswork here, as you may see and I don't know if this is consistent behaviour for different types of NICs, or if this is depending on drivers for the PCMCIA/cardbus controller.
/RID

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jhance

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