Dell,..760 Desk top running windows 7 professional,... I had a bit of a crash which I think was mostly power related,..anyway I got her back up and running and everything seem normal except that I cannot connect to the internet,... Ive uninstalled the internet adapter and reinstalled with no luck,.. I have tried and Belkin wireless adapter in usb port,..the computer see's it but when I hit connect nothing happens. Ive run diagnostics and it keeps telling me the internet adapter is not connected,...when I pull up the adapter in the device manager it says the adapter is working correctly,...when I run a check on the connection "path" it say internet adapter is not connected. Ive even tried downloading another driver onto a flash card (on a working computer) and installing it,.. to no avail. So if the internet adapter is corrupt or not connected,..shouldnt it still connect through a Belkin wireless adapter ??? any help is appreciated.
I can't help you, but what you described happened to me running Windows XP about 5 years ago and for the life of me I couldn't get the adapter to consistently work; although a wired ethernet connection seemed to continue just fine. Ultimately, the lack of any commonly understood reason(s) for the problem and utter failure in MSFT system software to provide a user-friendly troubleshooting experience chased me away to Chrome OS, and I've never really looked back.
Its possible that a power surge took out your LAN port. Switching to WIFI usb is obviously the right step in trouble shooting, all I can think is that maybe the drivers dont support win7? Might be time to update to a win 10 machine.
Thank you and both your predictions are reasonable... I do have a newer machine running windows 10,.. I just use this old one for pics and docs,...other than the internet issue it works fantastic,...thinking about trying one if those wireless adapter cards installed directly to the mother board.
According to statistics, removing the device from the device manager and reinstalling the driver helps with most adapter problems, if it does not require replacement Therefore, I advise you to use one of the free driver drivers here thinkmobiles.com/blog/best-free-driver-updater/, and update all your drivers in a few clicks