working on a laptop for a customer, a dell b130…
The ethernet port seems to be totally dead.
The wifi works great, but she uses verizon at home with the cheap modem, with no integrated router, so she can’t get online.
I have tested the pc at home with my time warner, and indeed the ethernet port is dead.
Everything is enabled, it just says network cable unplugged.
I’ve swapped the cable for 2 known good ones.
Right now I’m thinking PCMCIA to ethernet FTW…
Or USB. Could be cheaper.
Ask if she had a power surge or a lightning strike close by near the time it died. Common but usually on the modem side.
picked up a 15 dollar usb to ethernet dongle on newegg.
Sure beats the 30 bucks for a pcmcia version…
That should work fine for her deal…
The onboard ethernet is totally shot, I reloaded the drivers, and even flashed the bios on the notebook, its dead.
Stupid question : was the unit plugged in?
Because… a lot of laptops automatically shut off the ethernet port when on battery… and it would appear that it is broken.
Sometimes it gets fucked up and you have to manually enable it
+1
I am about to say the same thing.
Go to “My Network Places” disable and re-enable the LAN connection. See if that works.
Also, you might want to flush the assigned IP from your router (DHCP).
Go to Command Prompt, (Start -> Run… -> “cmd”) and use “ipconfig /release” Then, plug the network cable back in.
Hope this helps.
pconfig /release-/renew do not work if it senses no cable connected. And it seems like they were well past covered at this point.
That and making sure none of the pins are bent too far down/worn/corroded in the port as well. Could try bending them up a bit with a screw driver Otherwise, really isn’t much left at that point besides a 3rd party adapter.
Another stupid question -
Does the network card work during bootup? Set boot options to enable network boot with PXE and see if you see any blink blink
Check the BIOS and make sure that it is enabled in there as well, if there is a choice.
There are many different things you have to check before just saying “Yep, dead…”
Yeah I tried that for sure.
It is enabled in bios, and I flashed the bios to the new a10 bios…
Its definitely dead, I haven’t seen this happen on a laptop before…