woe was i that thought an intel nic could be had off amazon and not be a counterfeit POS
JC_Denton: that's too bad
it's happened to me
on a nic?
i was annoyed.  more than one port connected and the other ports drop to 10/100.
which seemed to line up with reviews of people claiming the cards were counterfeits.
that seems strange behaviour
cheap intel ebay cards from china have worked mostly fine
other than a weird eeprom checksum error that had to be fixed