Hello all!
I googled and found this forum and I must say I sort of have the same problem, if not entirely identical. So sorry for bumping an old thread.
I'm running Windows 7 x64 Enterprise Edition with latest OS patches, latest LAN drivers etc.
My network card belongs to the "Realtek PCIe GBE" family just like the thread starter's.
My issue is that my internet dies at random, usually when playing games (Global Agenda in this case) and I noticed that utorrent killed my connection as well. It doesn't happen that frequently but it does happen and when it does, it's frequency will increase and I got an unstable connection until reboot.
When it dies, I can't communicate with the router anymore, eg. pings don't work. I know it's not my router going haywire because other workstations that are connected to it works just fine.
Only way for me to get my net back up again is to go into the network and sharing thingy and Disable/Enable the LAN adapter and as soon as I enable the LAN adapter, I immediately get a working connection.
I can't recall having this issue when I got this machine (a bit over a month ago), it kinda started like a week ago, the day after I installed OpenSSH and hMailServer on this machine but I don't think those two applications are the root of the problem.
I downloaded that realtek diagnostic tool and looked around a bit and there are two tests you can do under "diagnostics", one works as a ping tester (sender and receiver) but if I start any of those, my connection dies! I doubt that's the way it should work heh.
Then there's the other diagnostic test where it tests "Register", "MAC loopback", "PHY looback", "IRQ" and "FIFO" and I've only run that test once and when it got to PHY loopback, my connection died again.
I noticed something interesting, whenever my connection died from the tests being provided in the realtek diagnostic tool, I still got a connection, it's just that it can no longer get DNS to work so pings works fine against IP address'.
Really weird..
I sent an email to Gigabyte who is my motherboard provider (onboard LAN..), we'll see what they say. I don't got good experience from motherboard manufacturers when it comes to support though, either they reply with obvious stuff or they don't reply at all...
Argh... I just want my computer to work as it should!! *pulls hair*
