Network card driver issues

saint2e

I'm building a laptop machine here at work to be a mock up of a customer's environment that we're going to be installing/testing our software on. One of the integrations we have is with a product that needs to be on Windows 2000 Server, or Windows 2003 Server.

Here's my problem: The network card doesn't seem to have ANY drivers that are compatible with Windows 2000 Server and Windows 2003 Server.

I had XP installed on the machine and the drivers from the manufacturer worked fine. It originally had regular Windows 2000 and the network card worked fine.

It's a standard Dell Latitude 600, and the network card I have is a Broadcom NetXtreme 57xx Gigabet ethernet controller, and I've been to www.broadcom.com and tried pretty much every different set of drivers there known to man.

This just seems like I'm missing something here. I'd rather not have to hunt down another laptop as it took me forever to get this one, but I'm just wondering if you guys can see any flaw in what I'm trying to do here.

Ruckus

That's very odd, Windows 2000 drivers should generally work across all of those platforms, and Windows XP drivers should work in XP and 2003, if the manufacturer even bothered to create seperate sets.

What exactly does it do if you try and force 2k or 2k3 server to use the 2k drivers? Init failure? Complete failure to install?

saint2e

Yeah, it essentially says that it couldn't start the device. I'm quite puzzled. I've found a desktop machine in the meantime, and that seems to be working out for me, although it's not a laptop.

I guess we'll have to suck it up. Very odd, I thought though.

Ruckus

I'm gonna PM you this too:

Find out if there's a Windows 2000 or XP chipset driver for the laptop. I've had this problem before with Video cards, where the video card pushes an error that says: Device failed to initialize properly or some jazz, it turns out that there was nothing wrong with the card, but the chipset interface to the card.