[Joshel]

Okay, so there's a long story here, but basically I think somehow my ethernet port is fried. Let me explain...

I recently installed the Win7 beta for funsies, all was fine to begin with, but slowly ran into problems, had some major driver issues with my Creative sound card but mostly seemed to overcome them. Anyway, after getting Win7 pretty much fully up and running I mooch off somewhere. I return later to find that Win7 has put the computer into sleep mode, so I click the mouse button and the machine starts to whirr back to life.

Nothing happens though, the machine has clearly realised it's supposed to be coming out of sleep mode but I get nada, the signal to the monitor is fine aswell. So I force restart, no fuss... until windows crashes on startup, and again, and again.

Anyway after this whole deal, and trying to repair the startup with system restore, lastgood and Win7's built in repair feature (with no luck) I decide it is Win7's fault and wipe it completely, cut to about an hour later. I've reinstalled XP Pro no problems. Try to install the ethernet drivers (Attansic Gigabit ethernet drivers, the ethernet port is part of my Asus M2V mobo) and the installer doesn't close...

Basically to put a long story short I've reinstalled Win7 and WinXP about twice each after that incident, and every time I run into massive issues trying to install the drivers for the ethernet port, device manager mostly recognises the hardware and says its running fine, but it clearly isn't. I've tried 4 different versions of the driver, all with the same results. Even though device manager doesn't think there's much wrong with the hardware the internet connection repair tool in Win7 said there was a problem with the hardware.

I don't get it, it sounds like the ethernet port has been fried somehow by the Win7 sleep mode, but I don't see at all how that could happen?

So I'm wondering, is there some kind of downloadable tool or some cheap and easy way to detect if it is the actual hardware that is broken, because Windows is giving me no hints and after wiping the drive like 4 times and installing different sets of drivers, each time breaking windows in the process and the drivers seemingly not installing properly every time I'm stuck.

Somebody please help, if anymore info is needed I will be glad to elaborate.

[armster]

I'd possibly look at trying to flash the BIOS of your mobo, go on to ASUS Website and see if there is a more recent version than what you have on your motherboard.

[Joshel]

Well after some fiddling it seems to have sorted itself? I unplugged everything, gave the entire PC a good clean, got rid of all the dust and what not. Reconnected everything, booted up windows and installed the latest drivers for the ethernet controller.

Guess what? It worked. So weird... Somewhere inbetween giving the computer a good clean and unplugging everything and plugging it back up the ethernet port decided it wasn't such a jerk after all.