As a little bit of expansion upon what I just posted... :)

The installation of a non-PNP jumperless NIC involves the following discrete processes:

1. physical installation (placement) of the card in a system expansion slot;
   
2. software configuration of the card -- definition of the system resources (IRQ and Base I/O Address) that the card will use and definition of the media type and boot options if applicable -- normally done from a Safe Mode Command Prompt boot-up;
   
3. installation of the card to the operating system -- e.g. software addition of the card to the hardware tree;
   
4. software configuration of the card within the operating system -- e.g. assignment of legacy resources to the card and installation of the driver; and
   
5. configuration of the network around the card -- e.g. installation and configuration of network client(s), protocol(s) and service(s) and identification of workstation on the network.

Hope this makes some sort of sense to you. Just think of the initial "configuration" of the card to be the same (it is the equivalent process) as setting DIP switches or jumpers prior to placement of the card into its slot. :)