Reliabilty

[RiverDog]

Recently the lan card built into my Gigabyte MB went bad. Is this a sign of a board on the way out or do you think it's an isolated problem. The system was built around three years ago.

 

[exar333]

If you don't experience any other issues with your board, it sounds like an isolated issue. Of all of the items to go bad on the MB, your in pretty good shape. Get a cheap dedicated card and continue on your way. If other items start to fail out, then it might be time to get a new board.

 

[RiverDog]

That's sort of what I was thinking. I didn't know if this was common or not. I was getting periodic connection failures for about a week or two but they reconnected in a few seconds without me doing anything. It finally couldn?t access the router so I hooked the cable to a laptop and it connected ok. I put a NIC in and haven?t had a problem since. I just don?t know how far to trust the board if one device failed on it.

 

[SanDiegoPC]

Dog just run with it. You fixed the connection prob and it's OK. Don't waste brain cells condemning the board just 'cause one device failed. As said above at least it was an easy fix!

 

[SilentRunning]

Originally posted by: RiverDog
Recently the lan card built into my Gigabyte MB went bad. Is this a sign of a board on the way out or do you think it's an isolated problem. The system was built around three years ago.

Riverdog would you mind checking what driver you have installed for your motherboard's LAN port.

If you see this thread I am wondering if a recent windows update may have installed a bad driver.

 

[nerp]

I would explore all software options or even swapping cables and trying different ports on the router before buying an add-in NIC.

I'm also of the mindset to replace the motherboard if a chipset device is faulty rather than ignore the issue. To me, any failure on the mobo is a mobo failure and not tolerable. The last thing I want is something problematic evolving into a bigger problem, like disk corruption errors. Generally, in my experience, when a mainboard or other central component starts breaking in one place, it's going to start crapping out in other places as time goes on.

 

[RiverDog]

Originally posted by: SilentRunning

Originally posted by: RiverDog
Recently the lan card built into my Gigabyte MB went bad. Is this a sign of a board on the way out or do you think it's an isolated problem. The system was built around three years ago.

Riverdog would you mind checking what driver you have installed for your motherboard's LAN port.

If you see this thread I am wondering if a recent windows update may have installed a bad driver.

This is the first I've been on the computer for a while and I didn't see that thread. I'll have to check the model tonight. Thanks for the info.

 

[pm]

So I've seen two systems do this:

Core 2 Duo, 975X DFI Infinity running Vista 64 Ultimate - LAN connection just disappeared entirely from device manager. Reinstalling the DFI driver didn't work because the device manager doesn't exist. It says there's no LAN card. LAN existed in BIOS, and worked under Ubuntu and Linux, but it was completely missing in Vista. There's nothing with a "!" next to it in Device Manager - the LAN entry is just completely gone. This problem started back in Oct/Nov last year, and my solution was to add in a spare 100Mb PCI ethernet card.

Pentium M 770, AOpen i915Ga-HFS running XP Pro - LAN connection is in device manager, but the device falls off the network whenever I do anything with it. It loses it's IP and then infinitely retries over and over. Rebooting solves the problem briefly but as soon as the connection is used for anything more than just surfing the web, it dies again. The problem started in mid-Jan '09 and my solution for this was the same thing - I used my other spare 100Mb ethernet card. .

I don't think either of these are board issues, but I didn't feel like prowling around in the registry trying to figure them out. I upgraded the Core 2 Duo system to a Core i7 and everything has been happy with it. I wouldn't mind removing the network card from the XP machine, I'll try rolling back the network driver. I have automatic updates totally enabled on the XP machine - it's my home theater computer.

 

[mindless1]

If it wasn't a windows update or driver change, the next most common reason I see for lan port failure is when a customer didn't have their switch, hub or router plugged into a good surge strip and an AC surge came in through the networking equipment, traveled down the ethernet cable and took out the lan port. In that case the rest of the system can easily be ok, or the surge could have also done more damage... sometimes subtle damage that takes awhile to surface or be realized. Sometimes it damages the network equipment hub/switch/etc port too. Sometimes not.