The Holzerian Nation

This one is a heads up for any Windows 7 users out there… After installing the most recent round of Windows 7 updates and rebooting, my network card could no longer connect to my home network.

The Problem

I went for the most obvious problem first and checked the cable. The cable was fine. Next, I tried to reset the router (unplug it for about 10-15 seconds and plug it back in). Still no luck. I walked over to my wife’s computer just to make sure there was nothing wrong with the router, and she was connected with no problems.

Though I had not personally experienced any networking issues in Windows 7 to this point, I had heard stories of people having to disable and re-enable their NICs in order to get them to work again, so I gave that a shot. No dice. Since it’s an onboard NIC, and I had recently been fiddling with the BIOS (setting up the onboard RAID controller), I figured I’d take a look at the BIOS settings. Everything looked good. I even tried disabling the NIC in the BIOS, booting Windows, and then rebooting and re-enabling it, with the same result. No network connection.

The Solution

After some extensive Google searching, all I found a handful of posts where people had experienced similar issues, but in each case it was either with the Windows 7 RC or an earlier beta release. Either way, I noticed that in a few cases, people had mentioned to try uninstalling the NIC driver, rebooting, and letting Windows reinstall its default driver. At this point, I figured “what the hell”, nothing else has worked. So I completely uninstalled the driver using Device Manager, also selecting the option to “Delete driver software”, rebooted, and voila! Windows reinstalled the driver for the NIC and everything worked like a charm.