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Let the old repair guy give you a hand there bud. And here you go. If that one don't work look up your specific model at driverguide. It requires a registration, but it is free to register and takes less than 5 minutes. I hope this sets you to rights.

true plug and play features are what makes the Mac a wonderful machine. Gaining basic functionality without software drivers is why many of us buy a mac.

Macs have software drivers. Otherwise, why would there be this? Just because they're setup transparently for most Apple and the standards-compliant non-Apple devices doesn't change the basic fact.

In spite of this, I always had better luck with the SCSI devices than any plug and play hack on the PC. Even now, iLife does a better job recognizing cameras and video and memory card, with no additional drivers, than anything else I have used. I would be surprised if the Mini required anything special to become a media center.

Know what I did to hook my digital camera up to my PC? Nothing. No CDs, no software installs, no downloading drivers nothing. I just plugged it into my USB port and up came a window with all the pictures on it. Confused? Oh, well, my PC is running Ubuntu 5.10 'Breezy Badger'.

When talking about a media center, remember this. The PC has alwsy been about craming in as much as possible because adding stuff, no matter what anyone says, has always been a pain. Recall the hours spend figuring out the slave and master drives? Sure they were easy to install, just often impossible to get runing. OTOH, the mac has always including fast external busses so one could add what one needed. The busses were even chained so new hardware would not need to be added to connect new devices. This is not saying one is better than another, but I prefer upgrading a DVD drive by simply plugging it into the firewire port than having to muck around the inside and setting pins and installing new drivers.

Blah. IDE is old school. I use SATA. No jumpers, just plug it in.

http://members.driverguide.com/driver/detail.php?d riverid=115821

The short answer is that, unlike 2 years ago, Linux now has better hardware support out of the box than Windows.

.my sig escaped and left this line

Nimbletech Search on Google

Just do a search on nimbletech and you'll see the history of heart and headache you may find yourself falling into. Nimble Technology resurfaced a few times as different Nimble* names, but the same old bull. Defective hardware, non existant customer service, they sold me a monitor that was either broken before it left their warehouse or during shipment (arrived 2 months late on top of that), and it wasn't even the right monitor! it took me weeks of calls in order to get anything taken care of.

you might be better off staying away, if this is the same company.

just check this out for an example

www.driverguide.com is always a good place to look. Get used to yanking the card, looking for the ID on any chips, and then searching for that chip's drivers. Also check out www.google.com and groups.google.com for other excellent places to search.

When you download the drivers, have a network share (or directory) with this file structure: /drivers/type[video,sound,modem,network]/manufactu rer/model/OS. Then, if you keep seeing the same type of card (not uncommon when you realize the machines you are refurbishing tend to come from a specific local manufacturer[s] who use the same hardware in each of their machines) you don't have to redownload it. And you can always burn /drivers/ onto a few CD's if your driver collection gets large enough to be useful.

In my business I typically go out to people's houses and fix their computers on site. In rare instances, I have to reformat their drives and reinstall Windows. Finally, after all these years, people generally know to keep their Windows CD handy, but all the other stuff such as modem, and video drivers are no where to be found. When they have Windows 98 or later my life is much easier, but even with W98, it almost never has the drivers for two things the video and the modem.

I now have a CD full of drivers for all of the most common devices I come across. This was built with the help of driverguide.com on the modem drivers section, and from various other manufactuer websites for the video. A collection of all drivers ever made is impossible, but one that has the drivers of most devices you run into is not. Just be sure to come up with a organizational system to put the drivers in any time you have to hunt one down for a new exotic device, and in a few short months driver hunting will be more a diversion than the norm.

Once you are done collecting your drivers, you can then invest time in organizing 2-3 CDs full of Windows Updates and bug fixes so that you are not sending virus prone machines out to be wrecked by some script kiddie.

driverguide.com

Besides, what weird NIC makes problems with 98SE? Did you try to download the latest drivers from the manufacturer. Always works for me. Or give it a try at driverguide (Username: drivers, Password: all)
As you see, it's just a matter of choosing the right OS for the right hardware. Hey, a few months ago I installed Windows 95 OSR2 on a old P90 with 24Meg RAM...that's okay for the old lady that just want to email her grandkids and play a bridge game.

I only know one person that runs Windows ME, and she complains all the time about her computer. I already told her I would reinstall her machine with something decent, but she doesn't want to hear about it. Her loss.