Weird one! Help needed

DanJGW · 12-12-2008, 16:14

Hi there! I've been experiencing weird symptoms with my mac and virgin b/band. The set up is
Mac G5 (1.8 dual processor, 1Gb RAM OSX 10.5.5) fed by ethernet to Virgin stand alone cable modem.

Everything was fine up until about a year ago and then one day (and ever after) I'd turn on my mac and there was no internet present until I went into system prefs and then a dialogue box would jump out saying new ethernet port found and then would have to ok it then everything would work fine, normal good net access and email, no problems. Now this in itself is a bit annoying that EVERY time I turn on I have to go through this little procedure, I could just about live with this. Also I could not get any joy with signing into itunes store, after the password prompt it came back with an error straight away.
I simply thought that I had a problem with the computer OS, maybe something had got corrupted. So I lived with it for ages until I decided last week to upgrade to the latest OS and also took the opportunity to clean install the OS onto a brand new boot drive. I thought this would sort out the issues and lo and behold it did! For only 2 days!!!!! Then it went back to consistent errors with itunes store and having to enable the internet very time i turned on.
So basically I've been scratching my head about this for a few days and to me the only logical cause of this can be that my internet access has certain ports blocked hence the computer not being able to 'see' the connection and also looking on the net it seems this might be the reason for the itunes errors.
So I'm just wondering if anyone has anything they could advise me with, I have contacted Virgin Support via email but alas they will not respond to me. Do you think a new modem will sort it out?
Thank you in advance!

Joxer · 12-12-2008, 17:29

Due to the fact that it says "new ethernet port found" rather than "new connection" I would asy something may be up with the ethernet pot on the Mac, I would ask my Mac owning friend but since when I was discussing the changes in the network preferences from 10.4 to 10.5 he said he hadn't notices because he never has to go there, I doubt it will help.

(Wanders off to boot up Mac)

DanJGW · 12-12-2008, 17:48

Thanks for taking the time dude!

Joxer · 12-12-2008, 19:59

I asked my mate and he says it sounds like a hardware issue - hard to tell from here though. Hopefully someone else will have an idea.