Quote Originally Posted by H1ghlander
Weirder yet, I booted 07/23 version on my HP ZE4100 .... I then connected it to the switch, and I now have connectivity in Knoppix, once I told Knoppix what the appropriate network info is.
That doesn't strike me as weird at all. It just sounds to me like a certain brand of evil software hasn't screwed your ZE4100 yet liike it did to your ZE5185. That's not to say that it will not; I ran my HP notebook for a while swapping between both systems and each worked fine. Then the Knoppix CD that always worked stopped working, as did other Knoppix CD copies I also had.

I would urge you to go to the website http://www.scyld.com/diag/ and get the nat semi diagnostics program and also the mii-diag program. Before you boot windows again on this system I would ask that you compile and run both of these programs with as many options as you can find (read the source to find all kinds of good options), and redirect all output to files that you can keep as a record. You'll be very very glad you have this information if the ZE4100 stops working later; you should be able to dump the eeprom settings now and reload them later. And this would certainly allow us to prove what is happening if you make note of when the problem first occurs (assuming, of course, if it does).

I would also say check closely if the two notebooks use the same chip. If it indeed does, you may be able to load the saved eeprom file into the ZE5185. And if you get this information, I would really appreciate it if you could send me a copy of everything; it might give me the information about the eeprom contents that I can't get from HP that would let me use the programs from www.scyld.com to reload my eeprom. And if I can get that working again I'll grab the new XP updates, and even reinstall all of the original software from the CD's that HP provided so that I can re-accept all of the "security updates" again and prove once and for all what is actually happening.

Of course, there could also be some BIOS issues that deal with the NIC differently in the ZE4100 than the ZE5185. I know my BIOS in my 4240 is extremely limited and more so than in many other HP Pavilion notebooks. I don't even have the "secret" diagnostics built into my system that many HP Pavilion notebooks do. Anything you can learn about the BIOS in each notebook might help too.