m1530 Network card died?

Hey, all:

I've been using my laptop daily with its ethernet port for my internet connection. A few times a week I'll use the wireless connection, which is easy enough to switch on and off.

Today when I got back to my desk and plugged in my ethernet cable, nothing happened. No orange/green flashing lights, nothing. Wireless still works fine, but I can't get a byte of internet out of the wired LAN connection. The device manager says it's a Marvell Yukon 88e8040 PCI-E Fast Ethernet Controller. Pinging loopback (127.0.0.1) works just fine and the device manager says that it's working properly. I've tried it with a different ethernet port & cable, but no luck. Diagnosing it with Networking repeatedly tells me I don't have a cable plugged into the jack. So here's the question: what can I do to try to resolve this?

Other things that didn't fix it:
-System restore to a few days ago
-Booting Ubuntu (used to be able to use the port, now it can't)

All things said, it looks as if my ethernet jack's somehow broken. But there's no missing parts, barely any dust in it at all. How can something like this break, and should I just suck it up and call Dell to replace it? Any help/suggestions would be appreciated.

Using a Dell XPS m1530 and MS Win Vista x64 Home Premium.

 

Since the thing is working properly in Device Manager, I'd guess that it's not dead. Usually you'll get an error or something when these things crap out on you. Even if it doesn't look like there's much dust in the jack, I'd try to clean it and the Ethernet cable itself with some rubbing alcohol. Failing that, I'd try a new cable as well. Are you absolutely certain that the Ethernet jack in your wall is working as well?

 

Thanks for the suggestion. Still don't know what was wrong, but there must have been some sort of bad configuration stores in the network card. I reinstalled the latest driver from Marvell and it's been working perfectly ever since.