I bought a couple of those. TPLink brand. With RTL8169SC chips
on them. Turned out to not be a particularly good purchase.
The problem with 8169, is it uses a lot of interrupts per packet
processed. By my math, around 5 interrupts per packet. Whereas
the motherboard NIC on my system, uses 1 interrupt per packet.
With the processor on this computer, that card will do around 70MB/sec.
(I get 117MB/sec using the motherboard Marvell NIC chip instead.)
By extrapolation, you'd need a Core2 processor running at 4GHz, to make
that 8169 run at full gigabit rates. It's a bit of a CPU hog.
I got the same "miniCD" with drivers on it. At first I was worried
it wouldn't fit my drive, but my drive tray has an indentation
the same size as the miniCD, so it wasn't a problem.
I think you can also get an 8169 driver here. The chip is made
by RealTek, so why not ?
http://www.realtek.com.tw/downloads/downloadsView.aspx?Langid=1&PNid=13&PFid=4&Level=5&Conn=4&DownTypeID=3&GetDown=false
If you look on this page, you can see the 57.19 driver I got.
http://www.realtek.com.tw/downloads/downloadsView.aspx?Langid=1&PNid=13&PFid=4&Level=5&Conn=4&DownTypeID=3&GetDown=false&Downloads=true
WinXP 32/64 and *Win2K* Auto Installation Program (SID:1492533)
5.719 2012/7/19 5038k
The link from that page, while I can paste it here, you can't
expect this to work for very long. The link is to an FTP site,
with the username and password embedded in the link.
ftp://WebUser2:YbwD...@207.232.93.28/cn/nic/PCI_Install_XP_2K_5719_04062012.zip
Now, the file I got a couple years ago was "PCI_Install_XP_2K_5719_11202009".
It's strange that the release number can remain the same, and the
date field end up changed. In any case, that claims to be a Win2K
driver.
In that ZIP is a "WIN2000" folder, and an INF like "Netrtlx.inf".
; DisplayName Section DeviceID
; ----------- ------- --------
%RTL8169.DeviceDesc% = RTL8169.ndi, PCI\VEN_10EC&DEV_8169
So you can give that driver package a try and see if it works. You
don't have to use the setup.exe in the package if you don't want to.
Navigate to the WIN2000 folder, right-click on Netrtlx.inf and select
"install" from the right-click context menu.
Paul