I'm fresh off a new install of Windows 98, and on my second a7v mobo after an untimely death of the first, and have been having a few hardware issues that are perplexing me.

First one is the ever-nagging issue of trying to install a network card on this motherboard. Has anyone done it and not suffered from interminable boot times after the installation. With my first A7V, I had version 1002 bios. Now,I have v. 1004d on my new board. Is this slow boot being caused by a network card/bios conflict or am I crazy??? (I've tried two 3com network cards.)

Secondly, I seem to be having problems getting my Plextor 8x4x32 CD-R going on the new board also. After I install the Plextor software and try to run it, I get an error stating that the SCSI host adapter could not be found. I don't even run any SCSI equipment in my machine. It's strictly IDE devices with DMA support.

Any ideas??

Thanks to anyone that could possibly help me in this matter.
-Dave Kochman