Realtek Lan - Spike/Crash at intervals in seconds  

Realtek RTL8101E Family PCI-E Fast Ethernet NIC (NDIS 6.20)

Windows 7

When downloading, usually with uTorrent, the following happens:

1: viewed from the Windows Task Manager, the connection slowly 'boots' to a stable speed

2: A sudden increase to percentages such as 25% or 100%, followed by an imediate connection crash of the network

3: It takes seconds until the connection is re-established

4: Re-start at step 2

I used the following diagnoses:
A 100mb bin file downloaded from my provider, tested on Windows XP with the driver from the CD - no problems
The same 100mb bin file on a previous installation of Windows 7, when I used "Roll Back Driver" - no problems - On this clean installation, this did not fix the problem
Using uTorrent on Windows XP with driver from CD - no problem
Using uTorrent on Windows 7 with and without Windows Updated driver - Problem
Browsing the internet on XP with driver from CD - no problem
Browsing the internet on Windows 7 with and without Windows Updated driver - Random delays, connection lost at random times

uTorrent can thus be ruled out as the cause. I'm fairly confident that it is a driver issue, however due to the issue I am nearly unable to download nor find the driver from the realtek website.

Can somebody provide me the direct download link or instructions to the link to the proper driver, so I can download it on another computer on demand?

Thanks in advance.

The problem was fixed by installing the proper driver, which I managed to download on another PC.

Which drivers did you download?

I tried the latest versions from the realtek website, 7.009 and it's not working. Same thing for 7.005. I am experiencing the exact same problem as you.

Thanks for your help

I attached the driver in a zip file. It is the one from Realtek.com, which I found by entering RTL8101E in the search box. I got a list with stuff, from which one (the upper) was a link to downloads. One of these downloads was the correct driver. Don't bother downloading it from Realtek's official website, as it is very slow, even without driver problems already. :P

Version 7009 should work. Before you install the driver, be sure to do the following: Go to the Control Panel, go to small Icon view, open System, go to the hardware tab, click on the button that takes you to the hardware list, find the ethernet device which is usually named after your realtek driver. Then, open the properties for the device and choose rollback driver.

Then, after you have restarted your pc with a clean driver, install the latest version I provided. This should work.

Thanks!!

I will try this when I get back home and tell if its working.

thanks again..

By the way, did you experienced any bsod while using some of these drivers with a torrent program such a utorrent?
It seemed that older drivers or some of them cause BSOD when using utorrent. I have yet to find what exactly causes the problem, I had the same problem in vista but it seemed like one version was fine with the BSOD and with the speed.

For gods sake, it's back. Recently reinstalled W7 due to misc problems.

And now the realtek driver doesn't work properly, I still have the problem.

Ugh.