About a month ago, my internet connection stopped working on my main PC--an HP Pavilion A450n. Did the usual--rebooted the PC, rebooted the router, rebooted the modem. Still nothing. Other wireless connections in the house were working fine. Bypassed the router and plugged directly into the modem. No change. Tried a different cable. No change. Went into device manager, and discovered my adapter--Realtek 8187--was not even listed. Then I saw an icon in system tray indicating driver installation had failed; went to the Realtek site, got the latest driver package. Still no change. Went and bought a new NIC (the name escapes me, as I'm at work now). Also not recognized by my PC. And, by the way, the green light at the ethernet port (for the new card) is a steady green glow. Am now using a Belkin wireless-G adapter, which seems to work most of the time. However--and this may be related to the above issue--it's not uncommon for me to come home at the end of the day and see that my internet connection has disappeared. I either have to reinstall the driver software or reboot the PC. WTF? Bad motherboard? Any suggestions welcome...

Hi, This issue can occur by corrupted NIC driver, damaged Motherboard or incompatible device with Windows 7. First, I suggest you access Windows 7 Compatibility Center and verify whether the hardware is listed. Meanwhile, I suggest you also try the following steps to troubleshoot the issue. 1. Upgrade the network adapter driver and Motherboard driver. If there is no driver for Windows 7, please download the driver for Windows Vista instead and install it in Compatibility Mode. 2. Modify Power Management settings. a. Click Start, right click Computer and choose Properties. b. Click Device Manager. c. Navigate to device which you want to disable Saving Power function, right click it and choose Properties. d. Choose Power Management tab. e. Please uncheck Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power. f. Restart the computer and test this issue again. 3. Temporarily turn off firewall for a test. If the issue persists, please restart the machine in Safe Mode with Networking and check whether network can be accessed in this mode. Thanks, Novak