Hi,
Good to hear you got it squared away....wired ethernet is almost always preferred over wireless in my mind...and YES maybe I am oversimplifying it....
On the other sub topic....
Whats the big rip on Realtek based ethernet cards ? I have used any number of them and they worked fine....nothing flashy, but they worked. Marvell makes nice chipsets.... NVidia mobo chipsets have decent enough ethernet ports, but some have had driver issues over the years as I recall....
On my win7 pc, The mobo has both a Marvell Gb and an NVidia Gb port....they both work equally well with the DIR-655....