Realtek 8139 drops the network build 7068

Hi everyone,

I am running a clean install of build 7068 64 bit on my amd x64 6000+ x2 athlon, I have a server which holds all of my media and so I play everything over the network. I use media centre for playing everything but I find that in the middle of a video/mp3 file media centre freezes and I have found that the network has dropped its connection. I had this problem with ALL of the builds but with build 7000 & 7048 updating the network card drivers to the latest fixed the issue. Now it doesnt matter what I try from build 7057 up it randomly does it. The OS does not freeze but what ever media centre is doing it takes so many resorces that everything takes about half an hour to respond so I end up switching it off.
This has been the case on the 32 bit builds also. I dont know what microsoft are doing with the network but it is really getting annoying.

Any ideas anyone?

Thanks for your reply

I have updated my system specs hope this helps

The latest driver they have is 2006 which is a bit old but I can see if can force windows to use it. . . .

Thanks for your help, I will post one way or the other.

Well I just downloaded the driver and it is only 32-bit they have no 64 bit driver listed. The realtek 8139 is such a generic chip I am surprised that I am having this problem. I remember when vista was released, I purchased the 32-bit version and it did the same thing. I got the latest driver from Realtek and the problem went away. Maybe there is a strange implementation of the chip on my motherboard, I cant think of any other reason cause it would appear other people arn't having the same issue.

The driver update from windows update totally borks my network connection, I just leave the default driver that gets installed.

I have tried both, the default and the updated one. They both stop working

What you describe sounds exactly how my PS3 would operate trying to play files over the network. I ended up figuring out that it was the connection type on the PS3 that was causing it, when I changed it to something it technically shouldn't be. I think I made it half duplex instead of full and then it started working amazing...1/2 second response time to play a standard .vob video file.

Maybe if all else fails and the tulip driver does not help, you could try something similar like I did.