Dual NIC's for redundancy

This may be more of a windows question, but I thought I would ask here first. I have 2 lan cards in my server right now, but only one of them is working (had some socket problems with games a while back, pre router times). How can I setup the second one to take over if the first one dies for some reason? I don't need to have both of them active all the time, as 100mbits is plenty of bandwidth. If the first NIC dies, I want the second one to pop up and take over for the first, without having to change port forwarding and stuff like like. The server is running windows xp pro. Can I do it on this platform? If so, how do I do it?

Edited for spelling

You might want to test this by transferring some dummy files first, but going into Network Connections, right-clicking on one of your network connections and choosing bridge may provide a solution. Just choose the other network controller to bridge with and XP will do the rest.

I haven't used it enough to know what happens if one of those connections gets killed during a transfer, so you may want to test it yourself by yanking an ethernet cable in the middle of one.

Software redunancy program called NicExpress. Costly yet it works just they way you want it to. One nic dies, other one takes over, but in the mean time they work together WITHOUT trunking the nics unless the switch supports it.

That software looks cool, but I think it's a little out of my price range. This isn't really mission critical stuff, I just want to play around with neat things. I was thinking of something more in the 'free' range.

free is good

never had a network card fail during operation though.

Some of teh proliant HP/compaq servers do this...i wonder if its hardware or software?

There are hardware and software solutions for this. I believe it's pretty common in environments where uptime is critical. I think in industry, it is usually accomplished with load balancing routers and/or managed switches, things of that sort. I really don't have a need for stuff like that. I suppose I don't "need" redundant nics either, it would just be neat. I have a SMP box, ecc ram, redundant raid array, battery back up (want redundant psu, but its like $500), so i thought redundant nics would be nice to have.

You don't want to have two nics plugged into the same switch set up as a bridge.

You probably need a server edition of Windows to do this, if MS supplies the feature in the os.

I'm fairly sure you can do this with linux, its inbuilt into the 2.4 kernel. However linux isnt really my cup of tea so i dont quite know

what brand is the server as I know Compaq had a downloadable network redundancy tool