System freezes/hangs on connection to ethernet and wireless

[neosenate]

Hi,

My laptop specs are as follows:

CPU Intel Celeron 1.1GHz
Memory 256 MB SODIMM
Hard Drive 30 GB UDMA
CD Drive 4x 4x 6x 24x Toshiba SD-2002 DVD/CDRW combination drive
Floppy Drive 1.44mb 3.5" Drive
Screen 14.1" TFT (Native Res.1024x768)
Video Card SiS 630 8Mb shared + TV Out
Sound Card SiS 7018 integrated
Speaker Stereo Internal
Modem Smart Link 56k HAMR56-V2.84
Network Card SiS 900 integrated fast ethernet
PC Card 2 x Type I/II, 1 x Type III
Ports 1x Infrared
1x Kensington lock
1x USB 1.1
1x RJ-11 modem
1x PS/2
1x Microphone
1x Headphone
1x External VGA
1x Serial
1x Parallel
1x RJ-45 network
Battery Info Smart Li-ion (Li-Ion)

The problem I am having is that whenever I put the ethernet cable into the laptop, the system completely freezes up. Neither the mouse nor the keys will respond. Only thing to do is restart the entire system. I thought this could be a problem with my laptop NIC card and tried using my Netgear MA521 wireless PCMCIA card with Ndiswrapper to connect to my network. Upon connecting the same thing happens - the whole system freezes.

I have tried Gentoo, VLOS, Ubuntu, Debian and SUSE - the same problem happens in all flavours. I am currently downloading Fedora Core 4 to see if it will work but I'm not too hopefull.

I have attempted to use DHCP and set the IP manually - both freeze the system.

Does anyone have any insight as to how I can get internet on my laptop please?

With thanks

N

[deltaflyer]

try disabling one or the other,could be that having both running is confusing the network

andy

[neosenate]

Thanks for the reply. How does one actually disable to pcmcia card? I took it out of the laptop completely and tried the ethernet cable. The system froze up in a matter of seconds.

Thanks

[marlowe]

Before pluging in the cable run ifconfig and see what interfaces you have up and running. Disable them all except lo and then plugin the cable and try bringing them up again.