Hi, please forgive my ignorance as I'm not an expert on these matters. Anywho, I've had a Dell Inspiron 8600 for about 8 months now and I haven't had any problems with it until about a week ago. For some reason, when I plugged in my ethernet cord, my local area connection was stuck acquiring the network address. I've tried a lot of things to resolve this issue. First I installed a new driver for the Broadcom 440x 10/100 Integrated Controller and this did not work. I also tried disabling my firewall and that did not work either. I was also instructed by a customer service rep to disable the programs running in the background and that turned out to not be an issue either. Winsockxpfix also did not help. The ethernet cord was not the problem either. When i plug in my ethernet cord it appears I an see the light blinking so I know that there is some connection. However whenever I try to ping another ip address, the destination host is unreachable. I'm starting to think that there may be something wrong with my nic. If there is anyone out there who could offer any help or suggestions I would definitely appreciate it.