sis645dx chipset questions

[df]

does the pentium iv uuid influence the mac address on sis645dx chipset?

i got a new notebook, and first thing was to disable the p4-uuid and to install xp-pro over xp-home. this done, i tried to connect to the network... instantly my dhcp router ran out of dynamic ips and its log showed over 50 ips allocated to 'sanjiyan' (my laptop). hmm whats going on.

stats on the nic showed ip of 0.0.0.0, same for gateway everyhing...
after about two hours I realised the sis900 nic had no MAC address.. after creating a MAC (I based this one as a mix of my router MAC and my desktop 3c905c-txm MAC), all was well...

the sis900 in my 815lmr pcchips board, same nic-type, same options in win2k, has a valid MAC.

some searching found the below info... the first paragraph is interesting.
"scheme to store the MAC address without the need of an external eeprom"...
hmmm if not in an eeprom, the only nvram/flash on the board is the BIOS/CMOS (i assume.....)

there is not enough options in my laptop bios for me to know if its hidden in there or not.

I cant test my theory out till I get home from work.. I'm a bit PO'd that I thought of this while at work and not last night.. grrr...

as a ps. xp-pro seems lesss professional+workstation like than 2k-pro. (not takling bout eyecandy here either.)

Going to install freebsd on it this weekend, hopefully this will tell me properly if it has a real MAC address or if its XP-Pro's fault. (i'm kinda pissed I nuked the xp-home install before checking something like its MAC address...)


http://www.sis.com/products/chipsets...ium4/645dx.htm

The integrated Fast Ethernet MAC features an IEEE 802.3 and IEEE 802.3x compliant MAC supporting full duplex 10 Base-T, 100 Base-T Ethernet, or 1Mb/s & 10Mb/s Home networking. 5 wake-up Frames, Magic Packet and link status change wake-up functions in G1/G2 states are supported. Besides, the integrated MAC provides a scheme to store the MAC address without the need of an external EEPROM. The 25 MHz oscillating circuit is integrated so as only an external low cost 25 MHz crystal is needed for the clocking system.

http://216.239.51.100/search?q=cache...n&ie=UTF-8</a>

Being a single chip solution the space usually taken up by the southbridge in the lower right hand area of the board is instead taken up by horizontally oriented IDE and floppy connectors. The single chip SiS735 sits rather high up on the board and you'll find a sticker (if you get the board with integrated Ethernet, there's one without) with the MAC address of the ethernet controller on the board

((strange...???))