Are ethernet cards just flakely?

It seems the flakiest piece of equiptment inside a PC is the ethernet card.

I've replaced several of them before in various PCs. More than any other card or device inside the computer. I've never had a sound card to go bad. Video card may have been going bad but the motherboard eventually died anyway.

I'll try to make this short as possible.

My parents go on vacation for 2 weeks. Dad shuts the computer down but doesn't turn the cable modem off. Long story.

He comes back and no internet. He's running Windows ME. I told dad I think it was because he left his modem running for two weeks with the computer off. Would that matter?

I called tech support and after going through their list they say it's his computer. Yet it worked fine the day he left.

Not satisfied with their answer, I take his computer to my house and it connects to the internet perfectly fine. Even through a Linksys router.

Take it back to his house and it doesn't. I call tech support (Charter communications) and tell them his computer works fine at my house but they can't provide an answer except it's his computer.

The funny thing is the second guy deleted the modem from the system and got the computer to connect but everytime I pulled up a webpage it kept defaulting to Charter's new customer page with their 6 step process. You know read the disclaimer and hit accept, enter your username and password, blah blah blah. But it kept getting hung up and going back to the previous page on step 3 (2 steps forward, one step back) so he did something else and was never able to connect again!

I take a spare computer to dad's house and hook it up. Unplug/plug the modem allow it to connect then reboot the computer. First time it doesn't connect. I reboot and it works.

I try his computer again. Still nothing. So as a last ditch attempt I replace the ethernet card. Still nothing. I reboot a second time and this time it connects. Just for safe measures I did a reboot twice after that and it seems to be OK.

First of all why am I having to reboot this computer over and over before it connects to the internet? If the modem is receving a signal, shouldn't it just take off the first time after I reboot?

Second why are my computers going through so many ethernet cards? Seems like the life of one is 3 years. Whenever I have a problem connecting to the internet and I have tried everything, replacing this $10 ethernet card seems to fix the problem 95% of the time. The other 5% a reboot will do the trick.

Then last why did his computer work at my house but not at his? If the ethernet card was in fact bad?

I sometimes wonder if physically removing the ethernet card, rebooting the computer to show it's not there, shut it back down, re-install the card then reboot and let the computer find it seems to work as well as replacing it. Yet just removing it under control panel and rebooting never seems to work.

In other words, I really don't know what I did today to get his computer to connect to the internet. Unless it was just a defective ethernet card but this still doesn't explain why it worked at my house but not his.

 

I have never had an Ethernet card die on me, but I have seen some unable to go much faster than a 1X CD-ROM drive when they should have been much better.

It might help to use a card from a company known for quality rather than a generic. My favorites are SMC and 3Com. Use a CAT5 or CAT6 cable, don't pinch or crease the cable, and try to avoid curves and corners in the cable run. You could even try shielded cable, too.

Sometimes the driver is at fault. In 2001, I got a Linksys LNE100TX v4.1 card to use with Win95B. I got tons of BSoD's. I replaced it with a SMC 1211TX card, and all went well, even after I upgraded to 98SE. The Linksys card now resides in my FreeBSD box and working like a champ.

As for removing and re-installing the card being able to help, that may be just Windows 9x/ME being Windows 9x/ME. From time to time, I had to move my SB Live! card from slot to slot to keep it working in Win98. I switched that box to Linux a year ago, and I never had to play musical slots since. I also have never had comparable issues on my Win2000 box, built 6/05.

 

I rarely have network cards fail on me. You do get what you pay for (I like 3com and intel network cards from choice), but cheap cards just tend to be slow rather than not working at all.

I think you may well have hit the nail on the head there. It sounds like you network configuration is getting messed up, and changing the card is effectively cleaning the mess and reinstalling. It isn't the hardware at fault but rather a driver/configuration issue.