So, I was helping a friend out the other day by troubleshooting their PC, & had pulled out my video card (HD 7450) to swap in theirs (turned out their HD 4850 was getting fried). After putting my video card back in, my PC wouldn't connect: it said there was no Ethernet port installed, & it was no longer showing up in Device Manager. It hadn't given me any trouble previously, & aside from pulling the video card I hadn't made any hardware or software changes that day (had downloaded a driver update the week before but hadn't installed it yet). I'm running Windows 7 Professional (64-bit), BIOS is version F4, have 8GB of DDDR (1333), with a Phenom II X4 970 BE (3.5GHz) processor.
I tried a System Restore (no effect), then had Device Manager scan for new hardware. It brought it back that night... but the next day the same thing happened (no Internet, no Realtek Ethernet), & this time Device Manager wouldn't redetect it. I tried reinstalling the driver (both from the original Gigabyte disk & with the downloaded driver), but no response. I bought a new Tenda Gigabit adapter for the PCI slot, & that's working just fine (auto-detected on boot, didn't even need to use the driver disk). But it seems like the PC takes longer to get to the POST screen (like maybe 30 seconds or so longer).
Is this a typical problem with the Realtek 8111E onboard adapter? Is this an isolated issue on my motherboard, or do I need to start worrying about the board going bad?
