Realtek NIC

[nitr0uk]

I've recently bought a new computer (spec in sig)

I've had it now for about 3 weeks and i've received 4 BSOD's since then.

On looking into it, it seems as if it was my Realtek LAN drivers so I have now updated to driver version 6.218 for my Realtek RTL8168D/8111D NIC as per the Gigabyte website for my board. All seems to be fine now but I have installed the Realtek diagnostic tool and run a test and everything passed ok except for the 'EEPROM' failed, is there any reason for this and should I be worried?

Also, I tried updating the driver to 6.222 from the Realtek website and it kept losing internet connection so I rolled back to 6.218 originally from the Gigabyte website and all is fine again, could anybody explain why this is happening? and since installing the updated drivers and rolling back to the previous drivers its now adding numbers on the end in device manager, e.g. #2, #3, #4

Any answers are very much appreciated.

 

[Rroff]

Some NIC cards have an expansion ROM (bootable, etc) on them which they don't bother putting on most consumer grade NICs - which is probably why you get the EEPROM failed - I'm guessing integrated NICs on a motherboard don't have these anyway.

Its possible that MTU settings with the newer drivers are wrong or they are just buggy.

Windows doesn't delete old network card profiles - so if you take a NIC out and put it into a different slot it will create a new profle for it, but with an incremented number on the end, when you rollback I guess it sees it as a new device and doesn't remove the old profile.