C
Charlie King
It has wrecked the onboard LAN in my A7V8X. I had to put in a PCI LAN
card. Others, not all of them Asus users, have reported similar
problems. In my case, the Broadcom LAN gets given an inappropriate IP
address.
My motherboard is a K8V SE Deluxe which uses Marvell onboard
10/100/1000 LAN. XP SP2 caused me no problems with that hardware.
XP SP2 does close a number of ports by default which will surprise you
if you've not read the documentation: assorted network shares may
dissapear, software that uses ports that have been closed will b0rk,
etc. These symptoms can look a little like NW Hardware issues.
It's difficult to see how the software could fry your LAN. I can see
that the vendor's drivers may have have issues that cause them to stop
working. If you can find a DOS driver for it, you could try booting
from a DOS bootdisk and seeing if you can ping across the interface,
otherwise KNOPPIX might be able to load it (unfortunately it doesn't
see my Marvell), so you can test the issue away from XPSP2
You say the device is being given an inappropriate IP address, which
would imply that the hardware is still working enough to query a DHCP
server, get an address and confgure it. In what way is the address
inappropriate? Where is the DHCP server - is it yours, or your ISP's?