interweb problems

Last night my Dad phoned me.

Or, more accurately, rather late last night my Dad phoned me.

Or, more accurately still, rather late last night, midway through a really heavy week at work, my Dad phoned me.

The reason he phoned me was that it was his switch-on day for internet and he'd plugged everything in and it hadn't worked.

Now I mentioned recently that my Dad is not hugely computer literate and getting someone who knows very little about computers to work through menus and stuff is not much fun.

It also doesn't help that his computer has all the 'making it easier' crap that Microsoft introduced for XP enabled. The reason I left it on was because I was worried his experiences at his computer class may not match up with what he sees if I switch it all over to the settings I would have.

The problem he was experiencing, however, was a bit of a weird one that kinda stumped me.

Basically, with his internet they sent a CD that guides you through setting it up.

Well, one of the early stages is obviously setting the network card up and as part of that it detects the card.

And it couldn't detect the card.

This I had no real explanation for because the motherboard has LAN built-in. This morning I even checked the model number online and it definitely has built-in LAN.

I was kinda expecting maybe the driver hadn't been installed properly, but it's not even reporting it in the system config as an 'unknown device'.

Something I read online suggests that maybe it's de-activated in the BIOS, but that means the default BIOS setting is for it to be disabled, which seems highly weird.

It also means that I somehow have to get my Dad to go into the BIOS and adjust the settings. And his last excursion into the BIOS was the whole route of the problems he had that ended up with me wiping his hard-drive and re-installing :/.

This should be fun :/.