Networking, Patches, Motherboards, and Vista -- Oh, My!

A while back, I built a desktop computer running Vista (duel-booting with Ubuntu), and I've never been able to get networking working on the Vista side.

The networking card is built into the motherboard:

Board: FOXCONN M61PMP/M61PMP-K 1.0
Serial Number: UY30946126928
Bus Clock: 200 megahertz
BIOS: American Megatrends Inc. 080015 10/29/2009

I've tried installing all the drivers etc that came with the motherboard.

Networking has worked on Ubuntu since day one.

To make matters more complex, Vista is not patched. This is the case for three reasons:

1. We don't have internet at the house right now, so it would be inconvenient to patch it.
2. We don't have internet at the house, so I don't need to patch it.
3. Even if we did have internet at the house, or I did take the desktop somewhere where there is internet, networking isn't working on the Vista side, so I couldn't update it anyway!

That being said, I'd love patch it, so if there is a way to do that, I'd be more than willing to do it.

But, ahem, my main concern is the networking, so if anyone has any ideas on how I could fix this, I would be deeply appreciative!

I've attached a complete PC audit, as gathered by Belarc Advisor.

Thanks so much for your time!

Cheerfully,
Narthur

 

Your drivers via Foxconn should be the LAN drivers here (if you can get their network to respond).

 

Thanks for the link! I went ahead and downloaded the Realtek LAN driver. Turns out I had already installed it, but I reinstalled it anyway. During that process, I got the same error message that I seem to recollect getting last time I installed it:

"The RealTek Network Adapter/Controller was not found.
If Deep Sleep Mode enabled Please Plug the Cable"

After a bit of research, I found that one possible cause of this problem is that when Windows Vista goes to sleep, it will sometimes disable the network adapter to conserve power, and then it doesn't turn it back on correctly when the computer comes out of sleep.

But I don't think that's what's happening in my case for one simple reason:

I discovered that the Realtek Network Adapter isn't showing up in the device manager.

Any ideas on what to do about that?

Thanks so much for your help!
-- Narthur

 

Ah, check the same page as earlier for the chipset driver, once installed, it may enable the LAN driver to install successfully.

 

Installed the chipset drivers (NVIDIA chipset drivers for WinVista_7-32bit) and then reinstalled the networking drivers. Still no luck. What should I try now? =P lol

 

Sometimes it's just easiest to install a PCI network card as you've gone as far as you can driver wise. You can get them for $10 to $20 or so, Windows will load a generic driver and away you go. That's what I had to do on one of my previous machines which didn't want to work with the onboard LAN. .

 

Just in case anyone stumbles upon this thread with the same problem, installing service packs 1 and 2 on Vista fixed the problem.