After the upgrade - NETWORK FAILED! I then tried rebooting with and without the cable plugged in, but it still didn't fix it. I intentionally left the network cable plugged in while performing the bios upgrade. I then loaded the additional drivers one by one, and between each driver I did all 3 (reboot, shutdown and turn on, shut down-hard power cycle-turn on) and it worked every time. I tried to get it to fail, restarting, shut down and power on, shut down, pull the plug, let the power dissipate and then plug back in and turn on, AND IT CONTINUED TO WORK. I then installed chipset and network drivers and it worked. So on my 2nd system, I still left the network cable unplugged. I ended up using msconfig to force default video mode (see previous post) and then reenable the regular video mode and it started working and hasn't quit yet. I tried to disable it and reenable but still didn't work. I continued to load the rest of the drivers and when I was done the network card quit working again. I loaded the chipset driver first, then the network and the network showed a cable was unplugged, I plugged it in and it was working. On the first one, I made sure I installed Windows with the network cable unplugged.
ANOTHER UPDATE- I have built 2 more of these machines.
