I had opened up my machine to reformat a spare Harddrive last night. When I buttoned everything back up and restarted, I get network errors.

So I opened up My Computer, Device Manager and lo, my network card was “failing to start” with that wonderful code 10.

My machine has an Intel 975XBX2 motherboard, with those cool blue flame heatsinks<g>.

Pretty much best of breed stuff, and a gigabit net card is built in; swapping out cards was a “only if I absolutely have to” option.

Have you ever noticed that for virtually any other problem on a machine, you can just jump on Google, find the answer and be on down the road? But if your network card goes sour, ouch.

I tried all the obvious stuff, uninstalling the drivers, reinstalling them, using the “Update Drivers” option from Device manager, etc.

I’d almost given up, but then I decided to try one more thing.

The internal LAN adapter can be enabled or disabled through the system BIOS, so I rebooted, got into the BIOS, performed a “Load system Defaults”, then restored all those settings that I had to (like the RAID settings, Numlock off on boot, you know, important stuff), and then set the LAN card to disabled (it’s under Advanced/Peripherals).

Rebooted into Vista and sure enough, now it didn’t see the LAN adapter at all. Good sign.

Shutdown, power off, and restart. Back into the BIOS, reenable  the LAN adapter, save settings, and restart.

Boot back into Vista. Lo and behold, back in business.

Now, if only that 120 gb Western Digital Harddrive I picked up as a spare, would recognize properly and not as just 32gb, I’d be done with hardware (for a few days at least).