nice post! its good to see that ther’s someone out there that is still bothered about the common user. and furthermore the dreaded “DELL EXPERIENCE” I HAVE A XPS M1330 with vista h.p & being a xp man like yourself i was new to vista but fairly confident . BOY OH BOY! WHAT A PILE ‘O’ CRUD! it now has xp pro sp3 & tweaked cpu affinity’s for stability and a funny little program called xp smoker that resizes cache files just right for dual core machines might be worth a try from a spare drive or partition, & with not much else installed its the fastest xp ive ever seen. once again great post, your info on the nvidia propertys was spot on and my desktops all singin all dancin again THANKS! AZBOLIVE@@ ~

I tried all speed settings and none of it worked. I figured out that my router (D-Link 625) was so old it couldn’t figure out things like auto-negotiate, which only served to confuse the old boy. That’s likely what happened with those who were successful by slowing the speed down, they were simply setting their speed to one that the router took as a default.
So I went old school and set everything manually. I’m sure my old router uses some of the wireless logic for access control so by simply bypassing all the dynamic crapola, I could just join the internet party with a faked invitation. BTW, if you use wireless and use Auto-negotiate in the in the speed setting of the NIC properties setting AND you have a newer router that can support wireless A/B/G and draft-n, than you’ll likely get wireless A and a lousy 1mbit transfer speed because the router will connect with the first negotiated speed. You should use the admin screen for your router to set it to wireless G or N, which ever you have.

@ Downer:
Do you use network lock, such as IP or MAC filtering and/or network security such as WEP on your router? If yes, go to the router admin page (I use Network Magic to do this) and disable network security manually. Also set your filters to MAC filters and manually add the MAC address of the NIC card that is active. BTW, make sure you have only one NIC card enabled and use its MAC. Reboot your router. If that doesn’t do it, re-install the driver for the NIC card you are using. If that doesn’t do it, buy an Apple computer. If it does, go back to your router and put locking and security back where you had them and enjoy a few cold ones, you deserve it.

@ Downer:

Wow man. I don’t know what to say. I’m assuming you tried different values for the speed/duplex setting right? Half, full, 10, 100, etc…

Have you tried a different router perhaps? That was my next step if this didn’t work.

Still having this problem with Vista 64. Your solution didnt work either. :(
Funny thing is, it also works on XP no problem.

I even tried Win7 64 (enterprise test version) and it still didnt work. Tried several fresh installs of my Vista 64. No go. Tried several drivers. No go. Tried billions of solutions on the net. No go. Tried 3 different NICs (Realtek, Atheros, Marvell). No go.
Then I thought it might really be a problem of the 64 bit drivers and so I downloaded Win7 32 and installed it. But no go either.

I’m really old school and won’t let a problem go unsolved, so I pursued this until I figured out why my Realtek PCIe Gigabit NIC wouldn’t work. I solved the problem by using the admin screen on on my D-Link 624 router to manually add the MAC address to the list of allowed devices. I moved the wire from my 10-year old nic to the Realtek and it was instantly accessing the internet.
BTW I have a Dell Sudio with Intel Core 2 Quad CPU Q9650 @ 3.00Ghz and 8 Gigs of memory. I use an ATI Radeon HD 4350 w/512MB and a pair of 24 inch Viewsonic LCDs; one with HDMI, the other with DVI. I have 650GB internal and 1.5TB external disks. I got all ths so I could do lots of Photoshop work, but alas, Photoshop would be 64-bit ready until next year and I have to be content with the old 32-bit version.

only got as far as Dell support and please pay $129 before I found this article. Many thanks. Worked like a charm.

Thank you. Thank you thank you thank you. Thank you! After hours of frustration with this issue you saved the day.

These were great ideas and thoughts. They led me to go old school. I installed a 10 year old 10-100 ethernet card and it works like a champ!
The problem was the the 10-100-1000 card and TCIP 6 overshot my cable/router. I get great speed out of the old card, 3 mega-bytes, so what’s not to like?

[…] is, who to blame for this. Is this yet another Bethesda bug? Or is this yet another case of a badly written 64 bit driver? Initially I assumed it was a bug in the game code. Now I’m not […]