Dear Indian guy please read from your script and listen to absolutely nothing I tell you. I love doing pointless things that involve trouble shooting my CD-Rom drive when the onboard NIC isn't functioning. When I tell you that the Link Lights are not active and that I've plugged it into 3 different switches with 3 different Ethernet cables. Please tell me that its my Ethernet cable or switch and have me call the manufacture of the switch for further assistance. When I ask you to think about what I've told you and your solution please email a link to a windows driver after I explained to you that I have a boot cd for imaging with the driver the NIC card of these laptops and its not working with that either. Also please suggest installing Vista because its more secure.
Luckily the next time I called back and got transfered to the UK and then to India and had to wait on hold another 15 mins I got a female Indian tech support agent who was able to put two and two together.