My brother has a problem with his Asus x42j Series laptop running a Genuine Windows 7 Ultimate x64 version.  Days ago he was still using his laptop connected to the network using a wired conenction and having no problem, all a sudden he can no longer connect on their Local Area Network using the ethernet.  He has no problems with the wireless connection but he prefers to use the wired connection because he is used on watching videos online especially NBA.

I was assuming that the router fast ethernet port was faulty but after asking him if he was the only one who is not able to connect via ethernet then I was able to conclude that the problem could be in his machine.  I asked him to open CMD and try to traceroute/ping to a certain public IP and turned out to prompt an error (see the img below).

tracert result

There are several suggestions provided by Microsoft’s Support Engineer and you might get bored trying them all and one of the worst solution they provided which I didn’t like was to restore the previous status using system restore (fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu).  Searching for an answer why this happened didn’t really helped me a lot, but based on reading the forums and some blogs this might have caused by 2 things: 1.  A new bug for the new eth driver  after installing an update  2.  Some driver files might have been corrupted.  But anyway I hope I can update this post and try to find out what are the reasons for such sudden failure.

Here is how the problem was solved and it was even suggested on MS’s forum (at the bottom part as of may 9, 2012).

  1. Navigate to the device manager (right click my computer > select manage > go to devices section > select the network adapters) as seen on the image below.


    device manager

    2.  Uninstall the Ethernet Adapter driver (JMicron PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Adapter).

    3.  After uninstalling, windows will automatically detect the hardware and re-install the driver.  After the installation of the driver you can should now be able to connect to your Local Area Network using your machines ethernet connection.

Another problem:  The problem was solved but after checking the IP configuration it throws a lot of Tunnel Adapter Local Area Connection (Microsoft 6 to 4 Adapter).  There was about  36 adapters added without even the user knowing.  It might look suspicious but according to microsoft this was caused:

When the computer restarts, the Plug and Play service shuts down before the process to enable the Microsoft 6to4 adapter to be reused is performed. Because of this, the adapter cannot be reused when it is reconnected. Therefore, a new virtual adapter is created.

Microsoft provided a hot fix on this problem for windows vista & windows 7 users.  Here is the microsoft’s link for the fix  .  Another fix to the problem is provided by Ryan Victory