Network card behavior

[Derrmerth2]

<p>First the basics. My NIC card in an on-board Marvell Yukon chip (80856 I think) attached to a Gigabyte P965-Ds3 Rev 2.1 motherboard. The board itself is maybe 8 months old. Latest WHQL for everything of course and firmwares.</p><p>Now the issue. My NIC seems to die after about a day of running. Generally some time in the evening when I'm on the machine, the NIC will fail. I can't ping or see my router or cable modem and all my internet connections are gone. When it gives out, it still shows itself as connected in the Network Connections box and working fine in device status. However should I try to reapir it fails the process after about 2 seconds.</p><p>Should I try to disable it or uninstall it in device manager, the window I perform that task in just lock up, however the rest of machine is fine. This leads me to believe there is a hardware issue with the chip itself. But at no point dose the machine ever say or hint there is an issue with the device. However, should I reboot my machine, it works again right away like nothing ever happend.</p><p>I have P2P downloads running during the day, so the card dose process active network traffic during the day but surely sees heavier use once I hop on my rig. I just had an instance where seems if I notice the failure as soon as it happens, I can do a disable/enable cycle and it will work again, but it seems to fail with in an hour or two. This was a one time sceneario but perahps repeatable.</p><p>I have no issue going out and getting an add in card but I would like to see if there is maybe something else at hand. It's always a good habit to learn what you don't know anyway.</p>

[antwar]

<p>well, you could have spyware/virii running and maxing out your connection. when was the last time you cleaned the rig with utilities?</p><p>an easy way to check for suspicious network activity is to make sure you have the network card icon in the system tray at the bottom right of the screen. once you have that up, disable/turn off ALL programs currently running on your comp that use the network card. wait about a full minuted, and if you still see full activity (both screens on the icon in the tray are lit up), then chances are you have some sort of virus or spyware running in the background that needs to be dealt with. there are stuff out there that can invisibly disable your windows firewall, and/or circumvents your normally running scanning utils, such as norton.</p>

[Derrmerth2]

<p>Nope. I run NIS 07 and Ad-aware 07 once a month and twice since this issue began. If it is spyware or virus, it is beyond the scope of these two programs even with thier latest updates. I'm also pretty attentive and educated and I've always spotted either of those two a mile away. But I'm not perfect so I have run scans twice in about a week and a half like I said.</p><p>More importantly let me clarify that it is (I really believe) not something maxing out my connection, its killing it. When the NIC craps out nothings coming in or out of my machine according to the networking tab of the task manager. My wifes laptop using the wireless to the router is just fine backing up the "not choking out my internet connection" side.</p><p>It is a 10/100/1000 wired connection and a 6Mb cable internet drop for the record. Good call on the spyware/virus but I hit that road first thing.</p>

[Wingrider01]

<cite>Derrmerth2 wrote:</cite><blockquote><p>Nope. I run NIS 07 and Ad-aware 07 once a month and twice since this issue began. If it is spyware or virus, it is beyond the scope of these two programs even with thier latest updates. I'm also pretty attentive and educated and I've always spotted either of those two a mile away. But I'm not perfect so I have run scans twice in about a week and a half like I said.</p><p>More importantly let me clarify that it is (I really believe) not something maxing out my connection, its killing it. When the NIC craps out nothings coming in or out of my machine according to the networking tab of the task manager. My wifes laptop using the wireless to the router is just fine backing up the "not choking out my internet connection" side.</p><p>It is a 10/100/1000 wired connection and a 6Mb cable internet drop for the record. Good call on the spyware/virus but I hit that road first thing.</p></blockquote>There where some issues with the later Marvel/Yukon drivers that was pushed by windows update, these where resolved by going back to the original driver that shipped with the motherboard, have you tried reverting to that driver?

[antwar]

<p>i concur with wingrider's post. and will also add that there are other pieces of hardware that there are "windows driver updates" for, but will break the hardware under windows if you use them. there are several pieces of hardware that i have ran into this problem with as a matter of fact.</p><p>also, NIS (home user version of norton) is NOTORIOUSLY bloated, and over time will slow your system to a crawl by itself without any spyware or virii to help it along. ihave seen this happen NUMEROUS times at work. what we use and recommend is AVG free antivirus for antivirus, spybot S&D AND adaware 07 both for spyware. these 3 catch 95-99% of all stuff that is out there (it will never catch 100%, no utility ever wil because it is always a catch-up game) and they do not slow down your PC too much unless of course you are running scans with them at the time. between scans, they do not slow down your PC much, if any.</p><p>norton is probably THE biggest antivirus/spyware scanner company out there, and as such, the coders who make the malicious software code thier stuff to try and circumvent its protections. and they do a fairly good job at it i might add. i cannot tell you how many systems that have had an up to date norton installation that could not find one pesky little virus, but as soon as i changed utils to AVG, it was found. it can and does happen.</p><p>all that aside, i do believe wingrider may be on to something with his suggestion of rolling back or reinstalling the latest motherboard drivers for your nic (assuming of course its built into the motherboard). if that doesnt work, post back here.</p>

[Derrmerth2]

<p>Haven't taken any drivers from Windows Update. Nothing against WU, I always go to the source for my drivers. On that note the drivers I have are the ones I have been using for a good nummber of months. Simply, no changes have been made to the drivers or network settings in some time that I did or am aware of.</p><p>But you do raise a good point. Reverting the drivers back a notch or two would be a good test. If the issue repeats itself I'll be able to lean more on the hardware side of things being the problem. </p><p>The only thing I have done lately was go from Roxio Easy Media Creator 9 to 10 which I had several days before the problem and I (maybe falsely) don't think that could be responsible for this.</p>