Network Driver Issue on Prebuilt

Shrimpables

I bought a prebuilt PC from Micro Center about 2 years ago and recently I've been having issues with my ethernet adapter. This is a Windows 10 PC, I'm not sure which specs are relevant here but let me know whatever info would be needed.

It started with the ethernet reporting "Unidentified Network" with no internet, but trying the same ethernet connection on a different device worked. I tried a USB to ethernet adapter and this showed the same thing. Then through troubleshooting I ran into another issue; whenever I restart my computer it now hangs on the loading restart screen for a while, and then bluescreens with a "driver power state failure" error. These are the main symptoms, Wi-Fi still works but I've noticed is much, much slower than it should be seeing as my computer is right next to my router, like ~10 Mbps down and less than 1 Mbps up when wired I get ~250/12.

Some other things to note, through attempting to troubleshoot this I've found many things surrounding the network adapter to act odd. I can not uninstall the network driver, it just hangs and never does anything. I tried manually updating the network driver as well but that similarly hangs at various parts of the install. I've tried a Network Reset, but this just runs into the same blue screen on restart issue and then nothing is changed when the computer eventually restarts. In my Reliability Monitor I see many hardware errors, I don't see anything discernible in the info for them but they line up with the days I've tried troubleshooting this issue. I've tried all of the usual network fixes, such as ipconfig resets. I have Nord VPN so I disabled the virtual adaptor for that but no luck there. I also don't use any antivirus/firewall software besides default windows.

I've tried just about all of the fixes I can find online about this, and unfortunately it seems I'm heading towards this being a hardware issue. I found a few threads of people who had very similar problems as me and it resulted in a motherboard replacement. I'd like to exhaust any other options I have before going there so I figured I'd get some help before that.

Thanks for your time.

PowerSpec_MikeW

@Shrimpables

What model is your system? What's the model number of the WIFI and ethernet adapters?

Please run this: https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/bluescreenview-x64.zip

It'll provide more information on the driver power state failure BSOD. Please screenshot what you see.

Shrimpables

I hope I'm getting these right, let me know if anything doesn't make sense.

The system model is G706, and according to my receipt more specifically it's POWERSPEC G706.

I'm not seeing a model number for the network adapters, but here's what I do see. Let me know if there's something else I can find for these.

Ethernet Adapter: Intel(R) I211 Gigabit Network Connection

WIFI: Realtek 8821CE Wireless LAN 802.11ac PCI-E NIC (Adapter Type Ethernet 802.3)

Here's a few screenshots of BlueScreenView, let me know if I can expand on anything in there, definitely above my understanding but I do see the crashes.

I see they all mention ntoskrnl.exe which isn't something I had looked into yet, so I'll do a little digging on that. Thanks for the help already, let me know if any of that is ringing any bells.

Shrimpables

Update

I ran the Windows Memory Diagnostic Tool upon looking into ntoskrnl.exe but there were no issues found. Just figured this may be helpful.

Ian

Greetings,

Do you happen to have any sort of third-party "Driver updater" programs installed? I have heard of those sometimes causing problems with using device manager to uninstall/reinstall drivers.

Shrimpables

I do now have the "Intel Driver & Support Assistant", but I installed that after these issues began as part of investigating this issue. I could just remove it to try, it's possible. It never did help as it was supposed to.

But as an update besides that, this just continues to be one of those issues.

Suddenly today out of nowhere my ethernet is connecting and seems to be working. I am getting very slow speeds, 12-15 Mbps down and ~11 Mbps, but everything is loading well as the latency is down. I even saw Steam download a game at 39 MB/s for a little while, though it was only in spikes and usually in the single digits otherwise. So it's very flaky, and I can only assume this has something to do with something going bad.

I'm not a hardware guy but if this is looking like a motherboard issue I would maybe just save the hassle and try a repair. But I'm appreciative of the suggestions, I'll check out a few more things. Since internet is working in general I'm not apposed to exhausting all my options before going there.

Ian

Are you able to switch to the USB to Ethernet connector mentioned in your first post and see if it works/what kind of speeds you get?

PowerSpec_MikeW

@Shrimpables

Doesn't explicitly point towards the NIC adapter, but does point towards a driver issue. We would need the minidump files from C:\Windows\minidump to dig further.

In the meantime, lets try a potential fix for the device. On the problematic ethernet adapter, select it in device manager. Go to the "Power Management" tab and uncheck both boxes. Lets see if it's related to the power saving features on the NIC.