Hi, this is in a way off-topic, so I post it here - it might be useful information for someone who had the same problem, so perhaps the technical support section would be more appropriate. Anyway, here it goes:
I have had a very bad weekend. Last week I downloaded and installed a lot of new drivers on my computer because I was going to play an AI War megagame with a friend during the weekend. But when I tried to connect the two machines, my computer could not recognize the ethernet cable, cable not connected, it said. But it was.
So we tried to play via the internet,the other machine with a cable connnection, and my machine via mobile socalled broadband. We connected via Hamachi (great little piece of software) and had an almost decent game with a lot of lag - so much in fact that we after a couple of hours decided to stop. We tried all the different settings to see if we could get better performance, but mobile broadband is just not broad enough, I guess.
Soo instead of playing, I spent my weekend with Google. I learned a lot about nic cards, like the relative merits of onboard vs. external nics, and I found information on a thousand things that can go wrong with your network. Lots of people have had this cable problem, it seems, and I tried all the solutions available, but without any luck. I ended up believing my nic was stone dead. No led lights, no lan conection, no mp fun.
I have talked to everybody, repair men and computer stores and other experts, and they told me that either I had a virus, or my nic was dead, or my motherboard broken. No matter what, it was gonna cost me. I am a very poor man, I cannot even afford to buy the expansion to the game right now, so this was very bad news.
Then this morning I checked Windows update, but no new drivers was available, it said. Then I went on the net and checked for myself, and lo and behold - there I found a brand new network driver. I downloaded and installed it, and then the little leds on the lan socket began to flash. Result: Now everything works, I have opened the game on both machines, and there is no lag at all, as far as I can tell. Just too bad that we cannot play mp again before next weekend.
Conclusions: (1) Beware of Microsoft Update, it is definitely not up to date, and it does not check all drivers, I found nine or ten old drivers, some of them very olde. (2) Beware of Nvidias drivers, this is not the first time I thought my computer was broken, and then it turned out to be a brand new but faulty driver that was the culprit.
My advice: If you have a driver set that works now, MAKE A BACKUP - if you don't know how, use Drivermax or something like it. I just did. So next time something does not work after an (automatic) update, I allways have a set of drivers that I can revert to, whenever I want to play AI War (which is all the time, it seems).
For the technically minded, I now use NVIDIA nForce 10/100/1000 Mbps Ethernet, version 73.1.4.0 (The bad driver was 73.1.3.0, I believe).
