I just bought a Lenovo M1 8171-58U Computer on Ebay for my grandmother. The integrated Gigabit LAN does not work, but I just popped in an extra Ethernet PCI card I had. I'm taking it up to my grandmother in Chicago in less than a week, so I really can't return it. I'm a little worried about the motherboard's Ethernet not working.

My question is this: If the integrated LAN went bad, is it more likely that other parts of the motherboard will go bad?

Your help is appreciated.

This could be a possibility, all I can say is, long distance trouble shooting is a PITA.

i dont think problem A always directly causes problem B, but its kind of like buying a used car. once one thing starts breaking down, who knows what else can go wrong just from the use and age of the other parts. and like bobb said, it sucks to have to travel long distances to fix a comp, and u might end up paying more for it in the end (especially if u have to pay for return shipping, restocking fees, gas to drive to chicago again, time, etc).

just hope for the best =P

Missing driver/ Conflict?

I dont think so. Motherboard manufacturers actually sell bad motherboards all the time, even intel. If youve ever bought a motherboard for less because it has less features then you probably have a defective one. Thats because the motherboards features all didnt work and the ones that didnt work were shut down and now its sold as one with less features. AMD does this with their processors. They make a quad core processor but sell the bad ones as a triple core processor with the bad core disabled.

SO NO, it doesnt mean other things will go bad.

Give it about 7months if nothing goes bad then then usually itll never get any worse.

Also I have two motherboards that have bad NIC but havent gotten worse. One is a dell and the other is home built. I own a business and my customers have NIC cards installed cause their onboard NIC went bad but everything else still works.

Computer Tech here. the network card on motherboards are usually cheap, and I've seen plenty of new boards with bad ports, and that's on good name brand motherboards.

So, I wouldn't worry about it.