Re: Network Cable Unplugged
Thursday, December 21, 2006 at 4:13 pm
Windows XP Annoyances Discussion Forum
Posted by kiwicam
(8 messages posted)
Hi all,
It seems to me that users are experiencing two types of “network cable disconnected”
error – an intermittent, reoccurring type and a permanent type.
I was experiencing the latter (my network cable never showed as being connected)
and after reading all of this thread I was still very skeptical that I had found
a solution that would work for me. However, to my amazement the solution was as
simple as,
Turning ALL power to the motherboard off!
Strange as it sounds, this worked like a charm. Perhaps some background will
help convince you. I have a dual boot system – two copies of WinXP installed on
two separate partitions. I use one copy for work, and one copy for testing. My work
OS has a very reliable network connection; however, upon rebooting and starting
the secondary OS, I was constantly frustrated by the “network cable disconnected”
error message and a lack of any network! The hardware is exactly the same; the drivers
are exactly the same – absolutely nothing about the system changes! It was enough
to drive you crazy. But then the simplicity of the solution (turning the power off)
would just about drive you crazy too. It seems the problem was that because I was
only restarting, a small amount of power was still getting to the motherboard (and
I suspect more importantly to the LAN card). In fact, like most modern motherboards,
even when I shutdown my computer, the motherboard still receives a small amount
of power (hence the term a “soft-off”. Actually, this is very handy as it allows
me to do things like “wake-on-lan” and power up the computer remotely. The only
way to stop the motherboard receiving this power is to actually turn the power off
or unplug the computer (known as a “hard-off). Although I followed the suggestion
in this thread of turning the computer off for 15mins, I later confirmed that in
my case a few seconds is sufficient to allow the charge to dissipate from the motherboard
and correct the problem. (My motherboard has a small LED that shows when the motherboard
is receiving power and once this has gone off it is okay to turn the computer back
on.)
Furthermore, I am able to consistently recreate this error. On restarting the
computer into my work OS I was expecting to receive the same error and to have to
power down the computer. I was surprised when the error did not occur. However,
on booting back into the testing OS the problem reoccurred thus confirming that
it is indeed repeatable.
Well, although much longer than I intended, I hope this post will prove useful
to those of you still suffering from this annoying problem.
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