Help with Ethernet card 1

[Dweezel]

I've recently installed Microsoft Virtual PC on my computer. I'm a web designer and I'm using it to run different operating systems on the same machine, that I can use as a test bed for my web pages ( different OS's and browsers display pages differently as I'm sure you know). To be in any way useful I need the OS's running inside Virtual PC to network with the host system (I'm running XP home edition on the host computer, and 98se and Me as clients inside Virtual PC.

When I was setting up Virtual PC I got a dialog box popping up saying that as I didn't have an ethernet card installed, The client OS's would not be able to network with the host OS. And that is indeed the case. All the OS's are working well, but it's not possible to network between client and host.

I've had a look on Ebay and ethernet cards seem to be very cheap, which is good news. I'm baffled by all the different types though. There are some that appear to need installing into the computer itself, some that look like credit cards, some that hook up to USB ports. Though I'm proficient in many types of software, I just don't have a clue about computer hardware, so I was hoping someone could give me some pointers.

I don't need to network with any other physical computers, I just need an ethernet card that Virtual PC will recognize so that I can network between the host and Virtual PC clients.

Any advice appreciated.

 

[Dweezel]

Forgot to mention my system info. Not sure if it's relevant, but I've got a 1.5ghz Athlom with 512k ram.

 

[bcastner]

http://www.windowsnetworking.com/ar...ll-Microsoft-Loopback-adapter-Windows-XP.html

 

[Dweezel]

Thanks bcastner. That's saved be time and money. Good job I posted here before getting the credit card out

Cheers.