Windows 7: Win 7 Network Problems. ALL Nics onboard-My Solution

There have been alot of people having problems with Nic cards under Win 7. It seems to be mostly the onboard nics.. Here is what happened to me:

Installed Win 7 on an AMD based sys. Biostar A770 A2+ MB. Everything worked. Ran udates and one was a new driver for the realtek Nic.. (At one time the onboard Nics and Sound were not 100% hardware.. They stole CPU cycles to emulate some of the functions on the NICS.) When it rebooted the nic did not work. I rolled back the driver.. it worked..

At somepoint the next day it stopped working when I started it up.. I hadnt installed much since it worked.. Runnning Diag.. it said no driver detected. I installed a d/l driver-Same thing.. This went on for a while.. When I tried to install driver it said couldnt find nic, if it is in deep sleep mode unnplug cable.. This made no difference.. I did manage to get it working once or twice in the next few days.. but it always went away if the comp went into sleep or I turned it off.

I have been doing this stuff for a while.. At some point I dredged up a problem Id had before when I booted a computer with a MP3 player plugged into the usb port.. I keep thinking about it and I remembered the one other piece of hardware I had added after installing Win 7 was a Logitech usb headset.. So I did two things.. I installed a intel nic in a pci slot, and I unplugged the headset. And wouldnt you know it.. I now had 2 network conections.. the realtek and the Intel.. I plugged in the headset back in. Let it reinstall drivers and rebooted.. Still had Intel NIC, but Realtek nic was gonzo..

I had downloaded many driver versions, used system restore.. almost reinstalled Win 7..

In summary: if your having a problem with on board anything.. unplug all devices except KB & Mouse.. everything else.. and then boot your comp again. Ther driver for the realtek nic, and the driver for the logitech comfort headset didnt play nice..

One other symptom.. I attempted to use a USB nic and it wouldnt load right either.. I dont know the exact hardware of the onboard nic but chances are good that it is a multy function chip doing all IO..

There are quite few drivers with that problem being reported, once the NIC driver goes into sleep or hibernation mode the driver dies and won't come back. So far the only way to fix this is to use a different driver or disable the sleep and hibernate settings for the NIC under power settings.

The logitech driver problems I have seen myself but it was with my G15 keyboard drivers causing a different problem. Once I installed the keyboard drivers I couldn't get a movie to start normally using WMP. I found a work around that involved playing with the WMP play button control settings but the logitech keyboard driver was definately the cause. I wonder how some of these drivers get past WHQL testing.

I am not sure the Comfort headset driver is WHQL .. I have this feeling that while it is the drivers conflicting, it would be less of a problem if we got rid of all the crap they throw on the MBs anymore.. it is so hard to find a board w/o sound, nic, video and whatever .. The problem doesnt seem to effect discreet Nic cards.. or atleast as much.. less software..??