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So I have a really strange and enervating problem:

My network card periodically just stops working and the only thing I can do to make it work again is to restart the computer or uninstall the driver from the device manager, and then scan for hardware changes, which reinstalls the same driver and it starts working again for a few hours or minutes.

  • When it goes out, on the taskbar it says that the cable is unplugged, which is untrue.
  • When I try enabling/disabling the network adapter, the enable doesn't work it stays disabled.
  • When I try enabling/disabling the network adapter in the device manager after enabling it says that driver failed to load

hardware & specs: Windows 7 Professional x64, ASUS M4A79XTD EVO motherboard, Realtek RTL8112L NIC.

I have latest bios, latest drivers for everything, I tried latest driver from asus, latest from windows update and latest from realtek site for the network card but all fail the same.

Any help on finding out what exactly is wrong would be much appreciated! Thanks!

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Have you tried a different network card? – Randolph West Aug 9 '10 at 19:13
well not really an option for me unless it turns out that I can't fix this one and then I might buy a separate network card – sekmet64 Aug 9 '10 at 21:17
I think Randolph was suggesting that you could borrow a known good network card from another computer. It would be worth a try! – Miles Erickson Aug 10 '10 at 1:36

1 Answer

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You might try hard setting the speed and duplex on either the NIC or switch. Auto-detect incompatibilities between manufacturers and sometimes even across product lines do occur.

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I have set it to 100 mbps full duplex now, gonna wait and see if it happens again or not. Also it does drop the connection on 3 different routers. – sekmet64 Aug 10 '10 at 8:43
nope, unfortunately it didn't fix the problem :| – sekmet64 Aug 10 '10 at 16:26
Then you have a hardware issue that may be interrupt related or just faulty hardware. Before writing things off as faulty hardware, you might try repositioning the NIC into a different bus slot, if available/possible. – user48838 Aug 10 '10 at 17:16
Yeah seems so, since I didn't really found anyone else with the same problem on the same motherboard, and no I can't switch the card since it's an onboard one. Well at least network adapters are cheap.. – sekmet64 Aug 10 '10 at 18:27
Since it is an on-board, you might consider moving around any other cards, if there are any populated. – user48838 Aug 10 '10 at 20:52
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