Off to a bad start

Well...I downloaded Windows 7 Beta when it became available. Got it with relative ease along with 3 keys for installation.

The install itself went flawlessly. The 64 bit OS looks great and seems to run great on my wife's core 2 duo machine with 4 G of ram.

There's just one small, but fairly significant problem for my install...it cannot seem to hold a valid IP address, which makes it impossible to get on the network.

It's a truly odd problem as well. The system gets a valid DHCP address at logon and connects to the internet fine. But as soon as you try to use it to get a remote resource or go on the web, it is unable to make connection for more than a few seconds, if at all. Running the troubleshooter, it first tells you that it cannot find the gateway, and then after several minutes, that it does not have a valid IP to get on the web (it ends up with an APIPA address).

So of course my first instinct is that there is a driver issue. That in itself is odd because I was initially using a Marvell Yukon Gig NIC that is probably the second most commonly used network card on desktop machines behind the Intel Pro. So it's almost inconceivable that Microsoft would neglect to include a valid driver. But just in case, I downloaded the latest driver on another machine and then installed it...but to no avail.

So then I purchased a new dlink 530T, their most commonly used gigabit NIC, and installed first the 64 bit Vista drivers (Windows 7 is meant to be 100% compatible with all Vista drivers) and then the Windows 2008 driver, but the same problem occurred. It would get an IP...and then it would lose it. Then, from 5 to 20 minutes later, it would again get a valid IP.

Thinking it may be a bum install, I formated the drive and reloaded from scratch but the same thing happened. So...just to be sure, I re-downloaded the image and tried it...but again...same problem.

I also tried 3 different sources of DHCP addresses, just to be sure it wasn't a problem communicating from the server, but nada.

But wait...try hardcoding the IP you might reply. Alas...I did so, but it still didn't work. It again couldn't see the gateway.

It's all very disappointing. Everyone else seems to be having a great experience with the beta...but not I, which is a shame.

Oh well...Back to XP 64 bit if I can't find a fix in the next 24 hours.

peace,
Aielman