This is my conclusion because under 'Other devices' are listed 'Ethernet controller'. So I open up the device manager and notice that apparently 4 drivers have not been installed properly.

Everything worked fine except I noticed the monitor is scaled completely out of proportion (using 800 x 600 resolution for some reason). I found the disk from the retailor from back when I bought the computer (it's like 6 months old) and started the formatting process. So my computer was running Windows 32bit and yesterday I decided that since the hardware supports 64bit OS, I should really switch to that (I shouldn't have.). I am also aware that this is not a completely uncommon problem. Firstly, I'm not entirely sure this is the right category to post in.