FYI: I tried out an old Netgear FA511 10/100 PCMCIA NIC in a three year old Acer 5610Z laptop running Windows XP Pro x86. The NIC shows up under Windows as an ADMtek AN985 10/100Mbps Fast Ethernet Adapter. It does not play well with FreeAXP. The virtual Alpha will boot VMS normally, with DECnet and TCP/IP services coming up without issue. However, it cannot actually talk across the Netgear NIC.
I switched FreeAXP to the onboard Broadcom NIC and shifted Windows to the Netgear FA511 and everything worked as it should.
