Help with Youtube please guru's :)

I understand what you're indicating but this was not hardware failure. This is an external physical connection that is not being used causing a software issue. This would be like you having an HDMI plug on the back of your computer and not having anything plugged into it causing your web browser not to open.

 

Just thought it will be a good example of complicated hardware-software relations. We can say that complexities of hardware and software are multiplied by each other resulting in very peculiar behavior of our rigs.

 

Major hardware changes require reactivation of Windows, possibly it uses the MAC address of the NIC as one of the methods to check the drive has not been moved to a different machine

 

I realize that, but these long pauses I don`t understand. And Device manager said everything is OK, and connection icon stated that cable is unplugged. My point is any strange behavior is possible.

 

Perhaps the NIC is intermittently failing, causing detection to hang the machine, but yea machines can do some strange stuff

 

Remove or exchange the network card and see if the problem persist.

 

I did that later on (NIC was onboard so I disabled it). But first I tried to solve by installing Win8.1. That OS behaved normal except for missing the net completely. With new NIC all is working (and I am starting to like Win8.1).