My son has a Dell laptop. He doesn't often use it on a wired Ethernet connection - the last time was a couple of months ago and it was working fine.
Tried it today and there is no sign of an Ethernet adaptor. In Device Manager there is just the WiFi adaptor.
Thinking it was a driver issue we downloaded the correct and latest driver for his Service Tag and installed that without any issue.
Still Device Manager shows no sign of the adaptor.
Add a network device manually selecting the driver that we had just installed. The 'device' appears but with a yellow triangle saying that the driver could not be noted. If you select 'update driver' it states that it completed successfully but the fault does not clear.
There is also another device, Teredo Tunnelling Adaptor which also shows a yellow triangle. Also tried 'update driver' which was reported as a success but did not clear the fault.
Finally put SLAX Linux on a stick and booted that. No sign of an Ethernet adaptor. I did this to rule out a Windows issue but I admit that I don't know enough about Linux to tell whether the Ethernet adaptor is there.
Also checked BIOS - LAN is turned on.
Cheers,
Nigel
UPDATE - just tried SLAX again. Opened a console and typed 'lspci'. This lists all the hardware - the wifi is listed, as is firewire, but no Ethernet.
It is beginning to sound like a hardware fault but does an individual adaptor on a system board just die like that?
Tried it today and there is no sign of an Ethernet adaptor. In Device Manager there is just the WiFi adaptor.
Thinking it was a driver issue we downloaded the correct and latest driver for his Service Tag and installed that without any issue.
Still Device Manager shows no sign of the adaptor.
Add a network device manually selecting the driver that we had just installed. The 'device' appears but with a yellow triangle saying that the driver could not be noted. If you select 'update driver' it states that it completed successfully but the fault does not clear.
There is also another device, Teredo Tunnelling Adaptor which also shows a yellow triangle. Also tried 'update driver' which was reported as a success but did not clear the fault.
Finally put SLAX Linux on a stick and booted that. No sign of an Ethernet adaptor. I did this to rule out a Windows issue but I admit that I don't know enough about Linux to tell whether the Ethernet adaptor is there.
Also checked BIOS - LAN is turned on.
Cheers,
Nigel
UPDATE - just tried SLAX again. Opened a console and typed 'lspci'. This lists all the hardware - the wifi is listed, as is firewire, but no Ethernet.
It is beginning to sound like a hardware fault but does an individual adaptor on a system board just die like that?
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