P5KC NIC issue on Vista

[patsisson]

I just built a brand new computer for someone and yesterday I finally took it over to his place to install it. Everything was fine when I booted it up, I was tweaking the settings to his liking (resolution, sound, etc...). He said he wanted to have it connected to his other computer over the network, so I updated his workgroup to match the other computer on the network. Vista requires a restart after changing the workgroup so I granted the restart.

After restarting Vista seemed to hang at the loading screen (the loading bar). I figured that Vista was just being typical windows and required another restart. The second restart was no different, hanging again. I restarted again, this time in safemode, and this time it booted fine. Since I can't revert the network settings in safemode I decided to reboot again but this time use safemode with networking. Again, vista doesn't boot, it hangs. As I am thinking hard on what is going on I notice that vista isn't REALLY hanging, it's actually moving EXTREMELY slow. So I decide to wait it out. After about 20-30 minutes, vista finally boots up. I go to check the network settings only to find that there is no network adapter in the network manager. I check device manager, and the network device is listed. I figure I will uninstall-reinstall the network driver. As soon as i click uninstall the computer freezes (this time it WAS frozen, no response at all).

This event leads me to believe that the onboard NIC is seriously borked, so I disable it in the BIOS and all of a sudden Vista works as if nothing is wrong (probably because there never was a problem in the first place).

Sorry for the long rant, but this is the 3rd asus mobo I have purchased in the last 3 years and again for the 3rd time the mobo has some really annoying problem that causes it not to work as advertised. I know this is a nforce forum, but people here seem to be much smarter than most other forums. I am probably just going to find a PCI NIC card and use that instead, but it would be nice to know why the on board NIC is causing Vista to basically fail.

Thanks.

[JTKWalesUK1981]

have u tried the lastest driver, phaps there was a bug in that version which has now been fixed

[patsisson]

It was actually installing the driver that caused this problem, the driver was the latest from the asus support site. I have just added a NIC card to the computer and disabled the on board NIC in the bios, this is an acceptable solution, but my hatred for asus remains.

[CvX!]

Hi,

I have exactly the same problem. Can you tell me what apps/drivers/updates have you installed before onboard network adapter went down?
Anyway I don't think it's a drivers problem, because after "that" happened I couldn't boot neither Vista nor XP.
Hope this won't end up with sending back matherboard...