Rats, my great new Shuttle SS51G has a problem. It’s network card seems to have given up the ghost. Nothing like spending two hours trying to figure it out. Checked the network cable with a good machine and that works fine. Behaves as though there is no connector there at all. Can’t see any packets, etc.

This is where I begin to regret buying a machine with no support. I highly suspect that the Realtek chip or the connector is bad or there is a driver problem. Trying the Shuttle Newsgroup as well as the Shuttle site and finally the underlying hardware at Realtek 8100B

OK, an update, finally got it to work. Not sure why, but installing the latest drivers from Realtek seemed to help. It is really a shame that driver support has to be so strange. At least it is not the hardware. It is working now I think. For those of you who may have had these problems, it is v4.5 of the Realtek drivers and there is a diagnostic tool as well on the 8100B download site.

I’m also thinking there might be some interaction with the driver and things that talk with it like the netiQ Qcheck utility or even AOL 8.0, but I don’t know. One thing to note is that this Realtek driver doesn’t seem to detect cable plugged and unplugged in that failure mode. Normally when you unplug the cable, XP detects this and says the cable is gone, but in this case that didn’t happen. Sure sounds like a driver is wedged.

I’m Rich & Co.

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