problems kickstarting with gigabit nics

[Ed Brown]

>  The VERY first thing to do is to use up-to-date versions of the OS's.

And to be clear that this isn't just a platitude, the reason for using 
the current OS versions is that nicdelay or linksleep or other options 
that you may find in Chip's presentation if there are others, may not 
be present or fully developed in 3.8 or 4.4.  This has been an active 
area of development in the last year or so.