We've got a 7950GT w/512MB ram. It's SLI, happarently.

And I'll try that network stuff right now. TVM.

In the Control Panel go to System. Under the Hardware tab, Device Manager, do any of your devices have a question mark or a yellow exclamation point? You might need to get the disk that has the drivers for the motherboard components if you see either of those.

Well I opened it up .. And then closed it back up again. There's a lot of stuff inside and I'm nervous about breaking something.

Back to Google I go.

Did the PC come with drivers and everything preinstalled? You may need to install the NForce LAN driver for use with your mobo.

Also, I believe that there is some sort of special fix that is required for Windows XP to play nicely with 4GB of RAM. I can't remember if it's a Windows tweak or a bios tweak, but I hear about it all the time on the musicians' forums I frequent. If I get some time later I'll poke around and see if I can find it.

Any chance your router firewall is set to filter MAC addresses and not accepting your new pc's MAC cause its not on the list?

He should still get an IP address from the DHCP server running on the router, he just wouldn't be able to go beyond his local network. 1Dgaf, try going to your router's IP address in your browser, it's usually something like 192.168.1.1

To add to this, if you've got an address starting with 169.254, your PC could not obtain an IP address and XP has automatically assigned this address to the interface. It sounds like you don't even have the connection listed in your network connections, though.

The NVidia network ports are notoriously terrible; the hardware is buggy and the drivers suck. You can usually get it to work quite well, but you have to turn off all the extra features. They work fine at a basic level, but most of the glitzy features are broken and never have worked right.

The normal symptom, though, is that you get a connection and things work, but then your network games are wonky and weird. No connection at all is unusual in my experience, and may point to outright hardware failure of some sort, either on the motherboard or, perhaps, the cable. Just in case, you have checked that your cable is in tight, and you've tried swapping cables? And ports on the router? You could be plugged into an uplink port by accident.

Assuming those things check out, you want to disable the advanced features anyway, so you can try that to see if it helps here. It probably won't, but if you're going to do it anyway, what the heck.

Depending on who did the installation, you may or may not have a Start menu item to configure the NVidia firewall settings. Basically, you need to do two things:

1. Disable the NVidia hardware firewall completely;
2. Disable "TCP Checksum Offload" -- and any other offload functions you can find.

If you don't have a start menu configuration option, you'll probably have them in the properties on the network card in Device Manager. There's a long list of properties, things like "duplex", "autonegotiation", packet sizes, and so forth. What you're looking for is anything that says 'offload' or 'firewall': disable those.

This probably won't directly help the connection problem, but you'll be annoyed with your computer if you don't turn those things off, as they will interfere with many games.

I took out the wireless card - didn't uninstall, just disabled before removing - and put in an ethernet card I have. The computer recognises it, but ... That's it.

I can see the new card in the device manager. I can check its properties and see that it's working, but I still don't have a Local Connection symbol or anyway to connect to the new card.

I'm getting quite frustrated. As I was bending over the machine, back hurting, I kept thinking about those Apple ads saying 'It works right out of the box'. ARGH!

I don't think it's the uplink port. I've used the same cable/port to get online with another machine.

I would agree with Malor I think. My Nvidia NIC is nice enough, but if I try installing the fancy crap its supposed to be capable of things go downhill pretty fast.

Issue you need to be working on first is getting that icon back. Without that I really don't think its time to wonder whats plugged into who yet.

I believe the offending fancyness is called "NVidia ForceWare" or something close. Get rid of that, reinstall the NIC drivers, and see where that leaves you.

Out of curiosity who is the manufacturer of the system?

Pol's idea of completely removing and reinstalling the Forceware drivers is a fairly good one. Install the absolute minimum possible features, as the more you add, the more trouble you'll have. And don't install NVidia's IDE drivers either; they suck almost as much as the network stuff. Regular Windows IDE drivers will work just fine and won't give you any trouble.

You could also pick up a PCI or PCIe network card for not too much. Intel cards are very solid and don't cost that much for the basic ones. (be careful: you can spend a lot of money on an Intel NIC. If you go that route, just get a cheapie $30 job.)

But, really, the NVidia port should work fine for basic stuff, it's just the advanced features that don't work.

And, as an aside, I think it's entirely appalling that I'm still giving this same advice after THREE YEARS of this crap from NVidia. What the hell is up with those morons? They used to be super competent, and all their drivers are just reeking piles of crap now. Even the video stuff, their 'core competence', is full of unfixed bugs under XP, and barely works at all in Vista. Grrrrr.

BTW, just so you don't get worried: with regular Windows IDE drivers and the minimum network stuff, the system should be extremely stable. It's annoying that you have to deal with these problems, but you can work around them, and the system should be just fine after you do.

Really Guru? Pity the guy didn't let us know. Still, it's on there when we upgrade to Vista.

As for removing drivers, I'm wary. It's a brand new build and I don't want to mess about with driver discs and what not. And if something goes wrong, I can't get online easily to get the drivers.

Tada!

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/888137/en-us

Honestly I've got 4GB in my machine right now that worked great under 64 bit Vista.. but since I gave up for the time being on Vista and went back to good old 32bit XP I've not even bothered with the /pae or /3gb switch.. it just makes XP that much more unstable and gives you no added benefit in terms of performance over 2GB.

Id, I've got the same NIC in my shuttle. It took me a while to get the drivers installed right and it still gives me some trouble. I just got a USB nic for ~$25 and it works great.

The story so far.

Took it into the guy that built it. About an hour to get there and we spent three hours at his office. He reinstalled XP. Then he got the same weird problem I did. We got the NIC working by uninstalling the Forceware drivers and removing the wireless card (that's going in a separate machine).

Now the computer can get on the Internet. Good. We drive home. I lug the computer to the top of the house. Will I get online at home? Yes. It works!

I decide to install Half Life 2 on the machine. I get the game and then press eject button on the DVD drive. Nothing happens. I press the button again - nothing happens. No sound, no movement. I try the second drive in the machine. Same thing. It's not working at all.

I check the device manager. Apparently I don't have any DVD drives attached to the machine. Instead I've got four removable drives -- which I'd never seen before.

So now I have a very, very powerful machine that's amazing at browsing the web, but f*ck all use for anything else.

Grrr. I've left a message on the guy's answering machine. I'm not going to tinker about witht he PC anymore.