Hoping some of the Windows ninjas can help.
Running Windows 10 Pro on a Dell XPS 8500 desktop/tower. Hard wired Ethernet from Dlink router to PC.
Had been working great for months. But all of a sudden (yesterday) - getting this message from "Net Connections." Ethernet, network cable unplugged (Realtek PCIe GBE Family Controller). It's strange because it had been working. The PC has WIFI so it's connecting that way.
Here's what I tried so far:
1. Plugged in Ethernet directly from cable modem. Same error.
2. Connected another device to router. It works.
Seems like it's some kind of issue with PC itself - either hardware failure or driver corruption ? Would there be a problem with deleting the Realtek PCIe GBE Family Controller in the Control Panel>Network and Internet > Network Connections - restarting and see if that fixes the issue.
Any other suggestions?
Hi you can certainly try uninstalling the driver & restarting. (Note, there is an option to also delete the driver, which means your PC has to download it again if you choose that as compared with installing from the driver already stored on you PC).
Presumably you've tried swapping the cable & router connection?
Possible bad cable bad port on the gateway or a bad NIC on the computer. Drivers have been an issue with 10 for a while.
Try the drivers from Realtek:
Realtek
Top entry in the table is for Windows 10.
Thanks everyone. One last question....
* If I delete the Realtek Ethernet driver - is there a danger it would knock out the WIFI connection, too? That would be bad...
Thanks!
It should not affect WiFi.
Thanks everyone! Great forum we have here!
Finishing up on an important piece of work tonight - but will try this tomorrow and see what happens.
Thanks!
No there is not, since you will be reinstalling the driver and device. You can save your connection info by doing this. Wireless Network Profile - Backup and Restore Windows 10 - Windows 10 blog
Always check the Tutorials. Brink has covered pretty much every contingency that could happen.
Thank you everyone!! You fixed it!
Uninstalled the Ethernet connection/driver - restarted - and boom - it works again! Guess the driver got corrupted somehow. At least fixing it was easy (with the guidance of this forum! Thanks1
Make sure that you disable Windows from updating the driver.