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    E-2610s, Network Interface Card problems

    Discussion in 'Gateway and eMachines' started by cpaxson, Dec 11, 2008.

  1. cpaxson

    cpaxson Newbie

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    Hello all,
    I'm an assistant network administrator for Arkansas State University. Recently, we have had to purchase quite a few motherboards for our gateway e-2610s series, simply because the NICs (broadcomm Gigabit Ethernet) have seemed to fail. While doing some research, I was informed of a conflict between the SP2 from Microsoft and our broadcom nics, I was told to disable checksum offloading and large send offloading. This seems to have worked on a couple of pc's, but I ran across an irritating little process called PRISMXL, which gateway uses at the factory to install the default software. I'm not sure, but it seems that this process puts an incremental burden on our nics, causing up to 3 trillion sent packets during the first couple minutes of network connectivity. Disabling this process allows the user to access the network, so I also did that. Now, with the background out of the way, my main problem is that suddenly, the nic in one of my pc's can't be found. I've checked the Bios, and the Nic is enabled. In the device manager, there is no network adapters tree, although you can view hidden items and find some other stuff, but still no gigabit ethernet. On a hunch, I uninstalled the PCI Bridge, to force the computer to reexamine the hardware, but still no luck. I'm out of ideas, so any help would be great. Thank you in advance.
     
    cpaxson, Dec 11, 2008
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  2. namaiki

    namaiki "basically rocks" Super Moderator

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    Why did you have to purchase new motherboards? Couldn't you have bought replacement PCI/PCIe ethernet adaptor cards instead?

    Sorry, no idea about your current situation though. :X
     
    namaiki, Dec 11, 2008
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  3. cpaxson

    cpaxson Newbie

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    We were at a loss. We didn't have any half height Nic's to replace the onboard nics, and since we have an open contract with gateway, it seemed to be the easiest fix.
     
    cpaxson, Dec 11, 2008
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  4. namaiki

    namaiki "basically rocks" Super Moderator

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    Just a hint: when you plug the cable into the NIC, does the led next to the plug still light up?
     
    namaiki, Dec 11, 2008
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  5. cpaxson

    cpaxson Newbie

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    of course, it wouldn't be feasible to replace every one of our 2610s motherboards. Broadcomm was of absolutely no help. I'm just trying to find a better way to go about it. We've got a few half-height nics that are supposed to arrive tomorrow, and we'll install one on the pc that is down to see if perhaps the onboard nic failed. Yet, I really don't believe the nic failed. It just seems to be disabled, but I can't find a way to re-enable it.
     
    cpaxson, Dec 11, 2008
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  6. cpaxson

    cpaxson Newbie

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    No, neither the status led or the communication led comes on
     
    cpaxson, Dec 11, 2008
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  7. cpaxson

    cpaxson Newbie

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    What bugs me is that I had the thing working for a couple of hours yesterday. I had some other issues to take care of and when I came back, no nic.
     
    cpaxson, Dec 11, 2008
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