I have a dell desktop with a built in ethernet adapter. For several months now it will stop working after several days or even weeks of working fine. Everything else is fine, I just lose connectivity to the network. Resetting the adapter does not help, the computer must be rebooted. The problem for me is that I leave it on all the time, and need to access it remotely when I am out of the office.
First of all, any suggestions for fixing it? I have google searched and not found anything helpful.
Second question: if I buy an ethernet card, I should be able to just disable the onboard card and use the other one, correct? Any issues with that?
Of course, one solution is to buy a new computer and reap the benefits of that, but I hate having to install all of the myriad programs that I use. It is probably at least 4 years old, but it is an i7 3.40 GHz, I doubt getting a new one would be any great leap in performance like it used to be. I do know that just starting a new computer from scratch everything will run much faster at least for a while until it starts getting loaded with all kinds of startup programs and such.
> First of all, any suggestions for fixing it? I have google searched and not found anything helpful.
>
> Second question: if I buy an ethernet card, I should be able to just disable the onboard card and use the other one, correct? Any issues with that?
>
Cheapest and simplest way out is an ethernet card. On Amazon from about $2. I wouldn't pay more than $35. Suggest 1000/100/10, but what you have now is probably only 100/10.
And yes, in the network control panel you simply disable the other one . I assume you've confirmed your cables are good.
Hey,
Did you buy a new router? I had a similar problem when I bought a new router to replace my spoilt one. All computer worked except for one old computer (most impt as we did our processing there). Internet kept getting dropped.
Turns out solution was that the router was sending in mixed mode. Once I fixed it to a single type (G,N,B,AC) it was solved. You can checked your manual regarding this.
Thanks. I did a lookup on dell using my service number, it says to disable to onboard in the bios, so that should work fine. Yes, I did check everything. It will work just fine at full speed, then all of a sudden not work, usually when I come in first thing in the morning. The computer does also have a wireless card, but I prefer using wired. I have about 25 other things on my network, and they all work fine, so i am sure it is not the switch or the router. If rebooting did not help I might suspect a bad port on the switch. Actually it goes through a small switch (4 port) in my office to the main switch (24 port) then to the router. But everything else on that small switch works all the time.
I am heading to the store now to get a network card.
I connected an additional computer to my router and just couldn't get it set up to find my network. In the course of trying different things I plugged it into a different port on the router and it worked.
That router port had died sometime. It worked last year. No idea why, but yes they can fail so no reason to think they can't also get flaky.
Fuzzy memory here, but it is telling me that there is a check box in the settings somewhere to not allow the network adapter to go to sleep or something similar. Seems to me that network adapters going to sleep are the primary cause of your symptoms.
Try going to Control Panel/System/device manager
Find your lan card and look at the power settings. I suspect you might well find something to check or uncheck in there.
easier said than done...Best Buy and Office Depot have no cards in the stores. I went to the local computer store (never been there before), he said the last one he bought he had to get it online, and not so easy to find. But he had one sitting around that he took out of an old PC, and he gave it to me (no charge). Going to try that for now. Turned out to be a really good contact...I wound up buying two laptops from him (I have been looking for new ones the past week), and will probably have him build me a souped up desktop. The laptops they sell at the stores are all windows 8.1, I wanted windows 7. He orders them online, takes off windows 8 and installs windows 7 for very reasonable price. And has a better warranty.
I put the NIC card in (a dell card into a Dell computer), disabled the onboard LAN, and...nothing. Doesn't find it. I tried going to device manager, etc, not found. Once I disable the onboard LAN, I only see the WLAN adapter, which I usually have disabled, but it does work.
I did find, under the properties of the onboard card, under power management..."Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power", which was checked. So, I unchecked that. Hopefully that was the problem. Unfortunately this is one of those things that seems to happen at random times, so it may be a while before I know if that works or not.
I thought about putting the computer in sleep mode and using "Wake on LAN", but after reading about it that seems somewhat complicated to get to work, especially over the internet.
> I put the NIC card in (a dell card into a Dell computer), disabled the onboard LAN, and...nothing. Doesn't find it. I tried going to device manager, etc, not found. Once I disable the onboard LAN, I only see the WLAN adapter, which I usually have disabled, but it does work.
>
> I did find, under the properties of the onboard card, under power management..."Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power", which was checked. So, I unchecked that. Hopefully that was the problem. Unfortunately this is one of those things that seems to happen at random times, so it may be a while before I know if that works or not.
>
> I thought about putting the computer in sleep mode and using "Wake on LAN", but after reading about it that seems somewhat complicated to get to work, especially over the internet.
Are you saying you do not see the new adapter in either the Device Manager, or the Network Connections window? That's very odd. Is it properly seated?
not in either. It may not be the right card...the card has a lot more "pins" than the computer slot does. The manual says it should be PCI express, and I don't see any full size PCI slots available. But, it was free so no loss.
> not in either. It may not be the right card...the card has a lot more "pins" than the computer slot does. The manual says it should be PCI express, and I don't see any full size PCI slots available. But, it was free so no loss.
PCIE and PCI are not the same. PCIE slots in Dells are usually black; PCI slots are usually white, and a little shorter. That could well be the problem. The most bomb proof are the older PCI---cards are really cheap (let me know if you need some, lol). But you mentioned you also have a wireless LAN card too? You using that or the original?
Have you installed any other new hardware? Sometimes different components may share the same IRQ and that sometimes causes conflicts. You can check the status of the IRQs and any other conflicts under Start/All Programs/Accessories/System Tools/System Information/System Summary/Hardware Resources/Conflicts/Sharing. While your there, click on IRQs and look for any errors etc.
Also, under Start/All Programs/Accessories/System Tools/System Information/System Summary/Components, click on Network Adapters. Check to see if there any error codes etc. Also check under Problem Devices.
Have you tried to uninstall and reinstall the on board adapter yet? If you haven't and want to try it, make sure you have the correct driver for it first. Go to Device Manager, Click on Network adapters. Once you see your network adapter, right click on it and pick Uninstall. Reboot. When Windows reboots it's going to see the on board adapter (if it's working properly) as "New Hardware." If Window's has the driver for it in it's database, it will install the driver. If it doesn't you may have to go back into Device Manager and reinstall it manually. Just remember where you saved the driver for it and navigate to it. It should step you through it and you may have to reboot.
Good luck!