foslock

Hey, so I built my friend a rig for him and his family a few months ago. It was working fine for a while but, being a curious techie... I was looking around his BIOS innocently and saw a feature called SMART LAN.

He has a GIGABYTE GA-EP43-DS3L motherboard with the most up to date BIOS is that helps anyone.

Anyways, I looked in the manual and apparently this feature is supposed to check the LAN cable, and if it's faulty it will tell you that, and if not it will just say that the cable is OK. So I did this test, with no real reason to, just out of curiosity. It said the cable was fine (as expected) and I decided I was done fooling with his BIOS.

So I rebooted, and to my surprise, I get the Network Cable Unplugged icon in the taskbar, then after a few seconds, I get the "Limited Connectivity" to an "Unknown Network" stuff popping up over that icon.

A little background. He has a Belkin Wireless Router (fairly new, not sure of the model though) that he connects to the internet with (he has a cable modem that connects directly into that as well). This setup has been working since I can remember, no problems at all. He connects with a few laptops in his house and the desktop in question has always been hardwired and working fine.

Now... the desktop is not connecting. And the weird thing is, if we hardwire a laptop into router, as if it were the desktop, they all connect perfectly, so I am lead to believe that there is something wrong with the desktop's LAN hardware/drivers. To further that suspicion, whenever I try to "Uninstall" the LAN driver (REALTEK (NIC 6.0) RTL8168 CARD) the computer crashes. It is basically a blue screen, but vista style. (He is running Vista Home Premium 64 bit).

I hope someone can help with this, because I honestly have no idea what the problem is. Could it be a hardware problem with the motherboard? Did that random SMART LAN thing disable or enable something somewhere? Any help would be much appreciated.

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GH0

Try resetting the CMOS, or if a new BIOS is available, try updating.

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Diligite Iustitiam Qui Iudicatis Terra | Love righteousness, ye that are judges of the earth! "We're not God. Not only are our powers limited, we sometimes are driven to become the devil himself." "Gather at the Archeron, prisoners of Charon."
"While the mother holds her child, watches them die, Hands to the sky crying, "Why, oh why?" Cause I need to watch things die...from a distance, Vicariously I live while the whole world dies, You all need it too, don't lie."
Please, help me out!