Network Card Drivers

In order for a device that is connected to a computer to work a driver is needed for it to operate.
Software (driver) that's used to manage a network card is called MAC driver.
A driver is software used by a particular hardware to communicate with the operating system.
It can be bifurcated into Vendor and Operating system.
The Vendor
Hardware components that perform the same task may have completely different methods of functioning.
Therefore they have different driver software.
The Operating system
The operating system and driver must be able to communicate.
You can locate the drivers of hardware from various sources:
A large variety of operating systems bundle drivers along with it whilst others must be installed when the hardware is added.
Most Network Card manufactures ship a disk along with their card which contains the model- specific drivers for different operating systems.
Many a times these disks have applications which install the card driver itself.
Network operating systems supply drivers for most of the commonly used cards.
Now a days incase of an upgrade the drivers are available on the manufacturers website as well.
One should always make sure that they are using the latest version of the card.
This is because the newest versions have the least bugs and always optimizes performance and reduces problems.
Operating system writers provide a generic device driver interface that the NIC manufacturers can use when writing the specific NIC driver.
All Hardware devices need to use certain computer resources in order to function:
Memory Address
DMA channel
Input/Output port (I/O port)
Interrupt ReQuest channel (IRQ)
A part of the configuration of the NIC driver involves specifying which resources are configured on the hardware.
Each network operating system specifies their own methods for installing and configuring network card drivers.
More often than not this takes place as a part of the setup process for the operating system.
However it is also possible to add drivers even after the hardware has been installed.
This is done from the 'Add New Hardware' function in the Control Panel.
Updating Network card drivers
Almost all vendors will develop new drivers for their cards.
The reason vendor's do this is because there are some performance issues with the old card.
Another reason new drivers are developed is because some conflict between the old driver and the card.
One should regularly check the vendors website constantly for updated drivers.
Another way is to browse through CompurServe and MicroHouse Technical library to be aware when new drivers are available.
You can then download these drivers.
There is absolutely no difference in upgrading a driver and installing one.
NDIS and ODI
Monolithic drivers are those that could be bound to only one protocol stack.
To achieve greater flexibility driver interfaces were designed to allow multiple protocols to be bound to multiple NICs.
The two interface drivers developed were:
Open Driver Interface (ODI)
ODI was developed by a group of networking companies Novell being a more prominent one of them.
The card drivers used with ODI are frequently called MLID drivers.
Network Driver Interface Specifications (NDIS)
NDIS was developed my Microsoft Corporation.
Both of these specifications were incompatible with each other.
However with the development and acceptance of Windows 95 as a network client the problems have greatly been reduced.