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Hoodsey

Member

Registered: 2011-05-11

Posts: 10

Xircom CEM2 PCMCIA Card

I came into 'good fortune' with an older Toshiba laptop, drawback is... no ethernet. It came with a Xircom PCMCIA Type III card and the ethernet port on that broke, so I bought a Xircom CEM2 PCMCIA Type II card off of eBay.

Right now my good fortune isn't so good. My RAM went out, one stick at a time, waiting on replacements, then my USB port went out (gives power, but fails to recognize devices on any OS). CD-ROM went out, so I purchased a DVD drive, some discs read OK, but since I have 64MB of RAM now I get kernel panics, so I've got to go light. All these parts are ordered, so I figured now would be a good time to troubleshoot this old new network card / modem.

All mini distros (DSL, Puppy, Tiny Core) pick up *A* PCMCIA module that seems to be the right one, but the ETH0 fails to start and apparently I'm not the only one having issues with this card. Even Windows XP has problems with it, and according to the EOL support documents the last supported OSes are Windows 98/NT/DOS. With a card this old and OSes that are somewhat modern, it shouldn't be this difficult should it?

MoonSwan

Member

From: Great White North

Registered: 2008-01-23

Posts: 881

Re: Xircom CEM2 PCMCIA Card

I've never had any luck with Xircom cards.  I've had 2 or three from the same era as your hardware and even under Windows they were a beast to get to work. 

Our of curiosity, why exactly are you spending this much cash on an ancient laptop?  I have 2 dell laptops here from a similar era (early 2000's) but both work fine so I've had no cause to complain nor am I likely to spend any money on them either.  Aside from that, the only reason I've kept them is to experiment on them and I don't do that very often right now...pity.

Hoodsey

Member

Registered: 2011-05-11

Posts: 10

Re: Xircom CEM2 PCMCIA Card

This is an excellent question.

The answer is, it's a project really. I can repair desktops, but I have zero laptop repair experience. So it's just something to do to say I've done. Silly, I know.

I had another Xircom card that worked great, that's why I went with another, I bought a Dynex also, but I can't get that to work on anything with any drivers provided.

Help on either would be fantastic though.