Mini-PCIE cards fighting over resources/alternativ

Seems like one step forwards, two steps back...

After my recent thread asking about why a USB-Parallel converter wouldn't work to take MPG input, I found a seller on ebay selling mini-PCIE cards that had a single parallel and serial port output for a reasonable price, since this seemed like it would simplify my life I bought one, installed it in the second mini PCIE slot and then...spent the next several hours trying to figure out why a supposedly PNP card wouldn't show up. My Bios has astonishingly little in the way of resource allocation settings so I am pulling my hair out trying to get the new card to work.

Finally pulled a trick out of my "old PC tricks" bag and swapped the mini-pcie wireless card for the ser/parport card and Bam! Got myself a parallel port. Now no wireless, but at least I've got a working MPG, right?

My cnc has a WTM D28 mobo with an intel atom 1.8 processor, 2g ram, onboard video, only accessories are the wifi card, the startech serial-parport card and my Mesa 5i20 (PCI). I'm running the latest updated LinuxCNC on Ubuntu 10.04

Here's a link to the Parport card: www.ebay.com/itm/390630814347

Any ideas to get the wireless card and the parallel card to play nice? If not, are there any USB wifi adapters that are known to work easily with LinuxCNC?

This mill isn't in a place where ethernet would be convenient to string to and I don't want to have to open the cabinet to pop in a thumb drive when I want to download a program from my laptop.

Hi

It sounds like an IRQ conflict, where both cards are trying to use the same interrupt

If your BIOS allows it, you can pre-set the IRQs rather than have them automatically assigned at boot.
Then you can make sure they have different interrupts, but you need to be careful re your other devices or you could end up
with a non-booting computer

regards