How to check if my ethernet card is dead?

[tranglos]

Hi, my first post here.

Two weeks ago I bought a T43 from "Thinkpadworld" eBay store. Looks new and is a great little machine, but I've already had a problem with it - one of the two RAM chips was faulty and was causing me a lot of headache until I removed it (now awaiting replacement).

Today though I've lost cable connectivity. Worked fine in the morning, but doesn't anymore. The thing is, I cannot tell if it's a software or a hardware problem. I removed the firewall, reinstalled the ethernet driver, removed and reinstalled the card in Device Manager, finally did a repair install of XP just to refresh the files, but no go. XP says the device is working correctly and displays the notification when I remove or insert cable; the LED next to the ethernet card lights up green when the cable is connected - so the card isn't wholly dead at least. PCDoctor didn't find any problem with the card either.

But I cannot get a DHCP lease, while a friend's older Thinkpad works fine on the same cable, as did mine only a few houra ago. I cannot ping an IP number, 'ipconfig /all' comes up almost empty (no default gateway, no IP, no DNS server, etc.)

So in the end I can't even tell if the network card is at fault or if it's a software problem, though I've tried to eliminate the latter. Is there anything else I can check? (I'm in the US on business, staying at a hotel, so my options are somewhat limited.) Are the Broadcom ethernet cards known to fail often?

Thanks in advance for any hints,
.marek

[ZaZ]

Did you try pinging the card, 127.0.0.1? That should tell you if the card is working. Since you just got this, I am assuming you haven't installed much.

[tranglos]

Thanks, Fred, I can indeed ping localhost. I've taken the machine to work and the cable works fine here, so the card is OK - I worried prematurely because of the previous memory chip problem. Now I only must figure out why it stopped working at the hotel, while a friend's machine connected to the same line has no problems.

.marek

[GomJabbar]

Check Internet Options to see if it is set up to use a proxy server or not. It probably shouldn't be. Check to see if IEEE 802.1x Authentication for ethernet is being used. Incorrectly set firewall settings could also be a problem.