Unless given away by a third party as a gift, they simply don’t exist! Even as gifts, they cost a significant amount of time and money and only run for a short period of time. The only ‘genuine’ offer I’ve seen is where a guy had to sign up to a dating site – even then, the benefit to the company is obvious.

Points cards are available cheaply enough from Amazon UK, Amazon USA and even on eBay (although your mileage with eBay will depend on the seller). So why bother spending countless hours chasing ghosts?!

Oh, one last thing to remember if you’re still searching for freebies – codes can usually only be used once!!

1. Intel PRO/100 (earlier versions)
2. Intel PRO/100 (when the above doesn’t work – this does!)
3. Intel PRO/1000
4. Dlink DFE-650 (PCMCIA)
5. Realtek 8029
6. Realtek 8139 (covers most of the 8100 range)
7. BroadCom B57xx
8. 3Com 10/100 MiniPCI (early Thinkpad)
9. 3Com 3C90X (3C905, etc)
10. Dlink DFE-530TX
11. Realtek 8169 (As used by NetGear GA311)
12. DEC Digital DC21140 (As emulated by Microsoft’s Virtual PC)
13. AMD PCNet (As emulated by various flavours of VMWare)
14. Accton/SMC EN1207D
15. Generic NE2000 compatible (it’s worked on a few oddball cards!)
16. SIS 900
17. SMC 1211
18. Dlink DFE-670 (PCMCIA)
19. National Semiconductor DP83815
20. Broadcom Netlink 4401
21. VIA 10/100 ‘Rhine’

Originally, this was written for a set of floppy disks (which is why you have the option to change your computer name), but currently I use it in the lab to PXE boot (google tFTPd32 and pxelinux! I might write a how-to on this one day). I hope everything should be pretty self explanatory – machine boots, starts DOS, loads himem, a RAM disk and a few other drivers, extracts the base network stuff from net.zip to the ramdisk, throws up a prompt asking what network card you’ve got (yes I could autodetect – but pciscan or equivalent hurt the footprint. This was destined for a regular 1.44MB floppy!), extracts the drivers from the relevant zip, creates protocol.ini and system.ini to match your chosen card, starts the network, grabs an IP with DHCP, and asks for a username/password. Job done!

If you’ve not got a DHCP server on your network (if so, get into the 90’s!) then I wrote protini.exe in VBDos and added support to handle parameters (IP and subnet). I forget what format they had to be in – but seem to remember is was fairly easy.

As for adding drivers for new cards – just edit selcard.bat and bung a zipped copy of your NDIS drivers into the \NICs subdirectory.

You can grab a copy of the image here:

http://www.phirebird.net/files/mnbd.imz

or

http://www.phirebird.net/files/mnbd.exe

Use it at your own risk, blah, blah, if your wife divorces you, blah, blah, don’t blow up, blah, blah, not liable, blah, blah, etc, etc – insert the rest of a usual disclaimer here.

Why would you use this? Well, I’ve found it useful for many reasons – mostly when trying to take or apply images from PC’s and servers. But you wouldn’t be reading this is you didn’t have a use for it – right?

phirebird.net has lent it’s name to the free Dynamic DNS service blazingbox.com. Have a mosey on over there and sign up for a freebie account!