Attempting to reinstall an old Ethernet adapter
Attempting to reinstall an old Ethernet adapter
I am currently in the middle of planning a new ethernet (with CAT6 cable for future proofing) run to multiple systems with some cheap and rather dated network switches (the host network switch is still quite modern and supports gigabit ethernet), that despite supporting 802.11n still only have "Fast Ethernet" ports (~100Mbps) and thereby as this network is certainly going to be bottlenecked by those switches, I am currently looking into the option of having one of the more data hungry systems (which happens to have a PCI slot) connect directly to the gigabit network switch so that it can better take advantage of a Steam cache server, and then sharing the connection with this 20 year old CNet PRO200WL "Fast Ethernet" adapter which is just as fast as the network switches with the rest of the network. My issue is that as far as I can tell the most recent drivers for the card were written for windows 98, ME, and 2000. Now I understand that this is a long shot, but as a final measure before I give up on the card, I wanted to ask if anyone here possibly had a solution to get this card working with Windows 10 without constantly having a VM running in the background.
Fast Ethernet operates at 10/100 Mbps, which is becoming less practical today. If the latest drivers are designed for older systems, it won’t function on W10 unless you install a different driver.
It remains quicker than the present Wi-Fi rates the machine using for its connection is at most around 60Mbps (as noted in the control panel). That's quite frustrating. I thought this was my final option, though.
I’m considering looking for a newer driver from the same brand network card. It’s unclear if CNet network cards are still available, but it might be worth searching for alternatives. You could focus on cards that were popular during the last ten years.
They remain available though I only locate their US site, likely because the main component was made by Davicom Semiconductor. To be honest, if the card doesn’t function, I won’t stress too much about it—it would have been great if it worked.
I've also tested the older drivers to check if it would function.