Agilent 1200 series Network issue

[CLSgroup]

We have an Agilent HPLC 1200 series and we are having an issue with connecting the computer to the company shared drive as well as having it recognize the HPLC. I should also mention that we were told that a network card would solve this problem but we recently installed the network card but still have the same issue where we can access the shared drive but the computer will not recognize the HPLC.

I have been told that the network card for accessing the outside world must be configured as the 2nd network card in the system. The network card used to control the instrument must be configured as the 1st network card in the system. If you do not configure the computer network cards in this manner, the computer will not talk to the instrument.

I was wondering if somone could help explain how to accomplish the above information or if you had any other helpful tips.

[Coffo]

Usually 1200 series LCs have an initial IP address of 192.168.254.11 ...
In order to connect you should assign a similar domain IP address to the network card you are using to connect to the LC (i.e. 192.168.254.xxx, where xxx can be any number from 1 to 255 except 11).
If you are running Windows 7, this can be done by going to Control Panel > Network and Internet > Network and Sharing Center. If you have two network cards, select the one connected to the HPLC (this will be labelled "No internet access"). When you click the Local Area Connection link, click on Properties, highlight "Internet Protocol Version 4 (TCP/IPv4)" and click on Properties. Now select "Use the following IP address" and enter 192.168.254.100 (for example - as long as the first three sets of digits are the same as those for the instrument and the four set is different) and 255.255.255.0 as the subnet mask and click OK.
You should now be able to communicate with the HPLC through this network card and still connect to your company share drive through the other network card (it will normally have an automatically assigned IP address).

[If you have already assigned another IP address to the instrument when you first installed ChemStation and ran the Add Instrument utility, you will need to change the above IP address to this domain or else run the Add Instrument program again and manually change the instrument's IP address back to 192.168.254.11].

The installation manual (p26-28) gives instructions for Windows XP and also suggests using 10.1.1.100 for the computer and 10.1.1.102 for the HPLC addresses.

[CLSgroup]

Thank you for the feedback. Luckily yesterday I had a Agilent technician help me with the issue but your description on fixing the issue is pretty much spot on. The issue we had is that the HPLC IP address had been changed from the 192.254.168.11. I beleive the technician tried to change it back to the orginal setting but for some reason the computer would not recognize the IP adress. So then she had me go to the back of the detector and change the configuartion switches so that 1-6 were down and 7 and 8 were in the up position. After I turned back on the detector she was able to "hardcode" the IP address then it was able to work. Thanks again for your expalnation. This will be of much help as it was kind of hard to take down the notes yesterday on the process.