Warning: Netgear 802.11g can fry your machine

I recently purchased some NetGear equipment including an 802.11g card
WG311 which has specified on the box that it requires a minimum P3 and
PCI 2.2 slot. They're not kidding. I put it in my low powered Celeron
766MHz system and after about 5 minutes of booting up with the card
installed the whole box froze. Odd, because this machine has been
exceedingly reliable. I reseated everything, removed everything to see
if it would come back but alas no. Chip / RAM / Motherboard has died.

I then tried my faithful Pentium II 350MHz machine. Also a rock solid
machine that has faithfully run for years. It froze on initialising
PnP. I was very worried. I removed the WG311 and everything was fine.
My C766 is still dead.

Er. Yuk.

Spoke to the 24x7 help desk support (in India) and was told that they
did specify Pentium 3 or better, with PCI 2.2.

Of course that is on the box, not in the manual, nor is it in the
software when you pre-install the driver as indicated in the manual.

Not Happy

 

You broke something putting the card in and out.
There's nothing in PCI 2.2 that would cause a PCI 2.1 or even 2.0 to "fry".

A card requiring 2.2 capabilities may never work on PCI 2.1 or 2.0 system, but
it wouldn't cause a fatal *permanent* injury to the system.

A couple of possibilities: if your system supports standby, and you forgot to
either unplug the power cord completely, or flip the AC switch on the back of
the power supply (if so equipped), with live power still on the system board
and you plugging things in and out, perhaps something went to Heaven; or you
dislodged something and have yet to lodge it again ;-)

/daytripper

/daytripper

 

Daytripper, I'd like to learn the different PCI specs in order
to be able to address questions like this. Where did you learn
the information used in your reply?

Ton.

 

I've been a PCI-SIG participant and reviewer for two different companies over
the last 13 years, and have done numerous PCI designs, including host (aka
"north") bridges, agents, and boards.

A quicker and likely easier way would be to buy a book (though not Solari's -
an unmitigated soup sandwich)...

cheers

/daytripper

 

Thanks daytripper, but I'm looking for a less indepth
level of understanding.
I'm a PC tech ( Wintel build and fix ).
I suppose that all I really need to know is
"what does the motherboard support" and
"what does the adapter require".
But I'm curious to know a bit more.
Do you know of any free web-based sources?

A question: What would be the reason for a PCI 2.2
adapter to require a PCI 2.2 mobo.That is, what prevents
some adapters from being backwards compatible with 2.1 or 2.0?

Ton.

 

Not really, no. Never had the need, you understand, I started with the first
draft PCI spec, there was nothing else.

Delayed Transaction was the biggy with 2.2, followed by refinement of
autoconfiguration rules (for 64b support, etc). There were other less
interesting changes, like redefining latency from RST# deassertion,
restricting the use of LOCK# to bridges, clarification of master behavior
during a target disconnect, and a lot of clarifications of 2.1 changes that
were botched during editing...

/daytripper