Ethernet card for my Parent's Dell machine

[Kraniac]

My folks have a Dell Dimension 4100. Basically a pentium III, 1 ghz machine. It's about 4,5,6 years old.

They want to bump their Internet up to high speed so I'm doing this for them.

It doesn't have ethernet onboard and I'm wondering what the easiest route to an ethernet connection would be?

Is it just a simple PCI card and a driver?

Can anyone recommend a decent product?

Thanks

[AllGold]

Yep, any old ethernet PCI card will do and it should include Windows drivers for the card. D-Link, Linksys, any off-brand, etc. 10/100 cards are cheap.

Is it XP or earlier? If pre-XP just make sure it has drivers for that version.

[Sam3]

Any of these should be fine: http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductLis...Submit=ENE&DEPA=0&Description=network+cards

[Kraniac]

I believe they are still on windows millenium edition

[Filliam H. Muffman]

Ugg.

You have to make sure whatever you buy is a major brand and has Win98/WinME drivers. A 1 GHz machine should be recent enough that you will not need to mess with IRQ and COM ports.

[cbelt3]

Kraniac- do them a favour and max out the RAM and install Windows Xp in it.

Or just go one better and get one of Dell's $299 Windows Vista machines. You're gonna feel like you're being nibbled to death by ducks fighting with Windows Me and the modern Internet (and attack vectors, viruses, etc.) Believe me. I went through that.

[ztirffritz]

Windows ME suckitudinosity is only exceeded by Windows 3.1. I STRONGLY recommend that you move forward or backward with the OS on that machine. There are still more machines running Windows '98 than there are ME. XP would be great, but that is difficult to justify the $100-$200 for an unsupported OS that is going to be used on a 4-6 year old computer. You might also try Linux on that machine. It should run well and be more secure.

[cbelt3]

ztr-
Linux being stable and all that, I would NEVER give my parents Linux unless one of 'em was a Linux-ite or other form of 'uxiAn. I can't think of a better way to guarantee that I'd be providing an hour of on site support a day, short of loading Windows Me.

[kap]

One of my relatives had the same machine. ME/2000 Pro ran much faster and better. XP was problematic, i.e. freeze, hang, BSOD, etc. It's not worth the money to upgrade. He got a $30 D-Link wifi PCI card from Radio Shack. And the system has been running fine.

[Filliam H. Muffman]

WinME was generally okay on a machine from a large OEM like Dell if it came that way.

If you could stuff in at least 1 GB of RAM and had a copy of XP SP2 available, I would say to install it on a new HD and keep the old one as a standby in case there are problems.