This is a follow up to another Q I had posted earlier.
Recently I bought 4 new HP Vectra VLi8 PC’s. They came with a PIII 550. The reseller had to install the hard drive (IBM 7200rpm 20GB IDE,) 128MB RAM (unknown manufacturer PC100 SDRAM chip -though the box calls for PC133 SDRAM — the PC100 seems to work ok) and a Creative Labs 52X IDE CD-ROM) because these boxes were basically a shell. Only the floppy drive, logic board, and power supply were installed. I specified Win98SE as the OS. I also had to add a 3COM 905C TX NIC. Since then, the problem is this…
About 45 minutes after a boot up, the box seems to “lose” it’s network connection with our servers. Any attempt to access ANYTHING by ANY means on those servers causes the the program trying to access it to stop responding. **However I can still float the internet through our LAN connection.** I have tried running Windows update, updating any and all drivers, flashed the BIOS, reset the CMOS, tried different branded NICs (both Intel and 3COM) in different PCI slots…all the same result. All connections checked, all diagnostics run (even HP’s own diags which failed the NIC test…I ran the same diags with other NICs…test failed). What am I missing here?!