[Tech] LAN Connection Problems

[Nanor]

Hey cuties,

Earlier this evening we had terrifically impressive thunder. It was striking quite literally right outside our house. As a precaution my father turned off the router & modem and unplugged them as well as my computer.

When the wrath of Thor passed I turned it all back on. I found they're all working fine and I can connect wirelessly using my laptop. I am unable to connect directly using my desktop with an RJ45. Using Windows troubleshooter it gave me some vague message which didn't really help. Anyway, here's what I've tried:

• Restarting.
• Uninstalling the drivers, restarting and letting Windows detect it and install drivers.
• Downloading LAN drivers from the manufacturer.
• Two different RJ45s.
• Some ipconfig /commands but I'm not at all sure what I was doing.

If it's any use Windows originally told me there was a problem with the Local Area Connection and now it tells me to plug in an ethernet cable to the computer despite having one connected.


Any ideas?

 

[Ronin Storm]

Loose connections or bad ports sound likely.

Check that the wires in the connector ends are firmly pushed in. Look for a network connection light on both the router (or switch?) and the computer.

Try a different port on the router. Swap for a known-good cable from someone else's machine and use their port.

Reseat the network card, if it's in an expansion slot. If not, check that the settings for the NIC in your BIOS all make sense.

 

[thatbloke]

You wouldn't happen to have a Realtek Ethernet card would you?

Two of the guys had a problem on the weekend when we were at the TBG LAN where despite having a cable plugged in their system thought they didn't, and it turns out they both had the same Realtek Ethernet card and they both had the same problem/solution.

With the cable plugged in, try going to the network adapter settings and bring up the properties dialog. Then at the top, select Configure. Select the Advanced tab. In the list, find the "Speed and Duplex" settings - rather than leaving this on Auto, try manually setting this to 100Mbps Full Duplex (or maybe even 1Gbps Full Duplex - try it, see if it works....).

Tihs will force your network adapter to a particular speed, rather than have it try and figure out what speed to use itself. We found that it sorted out the network issues that the 2 guys were having over the weekend by setting it to the above-mentioned 100Mbps Full Duplex setting.

 

[Nanor]

Well it was the router that was banjaxed. New router has solved all the problems.