I sudddenly lost my internet connection on my old HP

I have a HP Compaq nc8000 with the Broadcom BCM5705M_2 Gigabit ethernet card.

This morning I turned on the computer and the network icon in the notification area has the little triangle with the "!" and it says that the network is disconnected.

I have a working connection from my router to all other computers in my house.

I initially moved to Ubuntu 8.10 because the very same network adapter wouldn't work with XP, I tried all kinds of different drivers. In Ubuntu it worked right away, until now.

It's a fairly old machine, I suspect the hardware might be failing. How can I find the cause of this problem, whether it's hardware or software?

EDIT: I also found a USB WiFi-dongle (Trendnet TEW-424UB), but when I plug that in, nothing happens, and I don't know if or how I manually mount or search for devices like that.

So, still no progress.

 

Do you have another network card that you can try? Might be a hardware failure.

 

For reasons I cannot fathom, the connection is now back up.

Problem solved, I guess.