Default Gateway Not Available

I saw a relative few people having the same issue in Vista, none in XP, maybe I didn't dig enough. But yea, if I do a search for "Default gateway is not available" the entire first page is Windows 7. Since it works for most of my friends though that have it, I assume it's some setting or hardware conflict. Maybe BIOS, and I'm willing to eventually try a new NIC since they're pretty cheap. Anything to pinpoint the issue.

The odd thing is that when I played Age of Conan, I dc'd about 7 times every hour. Now that I'm back into wow, I dc 2-3 times a day. It really does seem to be related to the load of my network. When I was downloading WoW and SCII I DC'd about 27 times during the 5 hour download.

that is exactly when my problem arises, during periods of heavy load. i do a lot of downloading from usenet. and i saw this heavy load mentioned quite a lot on the google pages.
someone mentioned a fix

Open Device Manager
Locate the Network Adapter
Right click, Properties
Go to Advanced tab
Locate the Task Offload (aka TCP offload) property on the list and set it to Disabled
After setting this property and applying the changes, the Internet connection remained stable and no longer dropped out when transferring large amounts of data.

me myself i couldnt find the exact phrase so i adjusted tcp checksum offload ipv4 to disabled. it was on rx tx enabled. this seems to have reduced the problem.
i must add i havent a clue what i am doing or have just done
on that advanced tabs there are a lot of dodgy things enabled like "green ethernet"
best of luck!!!

an update. i have refrained from any heavy downloading or usage and i havent lost connection once.
dunno if that thing i adjusted the tcp task off load thingy worked or not.
now to try some heavy load usage.
hows it going for you kerrybiantulip?
good name by the way.

I have to admit, I've tried that as well. I haven't had to do many major downloads and I don't typically ever have to, it's just that my recent install of Windows 7 caused me to have to re-download everything I had with Windows XP. I just find it so odd that I have this issue with Windows 7 but in so many years of running XP, I never disconnected due to this issue.

well if you get a fix post it on here cos i get email notification.
cheers
al

aljaxon said:

good name by the way.

Thanks for that It's basically a combination of my first name and the nickname that my father gave me when I was a little girl. Not really sure when I first started using the sn.

Go to the realtek site and get the new driver (1005). It fixes everything.

ilike10s said:

Go to the realtek site and get the new driver (1005). It fixes everything.

no it doesnt.
i already have that one installed.

Downloaded it just to see, and that's a wireless lan NIC driver. Mine is not wireless, nor is it the same model as the realtek one you linked. I have a new NIC arriving in a few days, will post back if it does or does not resolve the issue.

I've actually been experiencing the exact same problem on my HTPC and have tried a few things (mostly to no success).

Here's a few things i'm sure of
1. It happens during heavy network traffic (very reproducible using bittorrent)
2. It seems to be specific to the NIC not the modem/gateway

The display name for the driver i have installed is "Realtek PCIe GBE Family Controller"
Hardware ID is "PCI\VEN_10EC&DEV_8168&SUBSYS_02791028&REV_02"

I upgraded to the "7.31.1025.2010" dated 2010/11/22 on the realtek download page.
I haven't been able to reproduce the problem since the driver update and I'm currently pushing over 1.3MB/s in download speeds.