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USB 3.0 Ethernet Adapter
I have purchased two Anker model A7611 and one Insignia NS-PU98635 USB 3.0 to Gigabit Ethernet adapters and neither will work on my Inspiron 5759 running Windows 10 Pro. I'm not sure what other info is needed to help me figure out how to get one of these adapters to work, any help is much appreciated. Both products are advertised as plug and play, I've downloaded drivers for both and neither work. I also followed Dell's instructions on "How to troubleshoot USB Issues" found here and no help. Any help would be so appreciated as this should not be this hard. Thanks
jphughan
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April 6th, 2019 12:00
Can you be more specific than just saying “neither will work”? Do the devices appear in Device Manager when they’re plugged in? If so, are they correctly shown under Network Adapters or do you see a listing under Other Devices? If the latter, the driver wasn’t installed properly. If the former, when you open the Properties pane for that device, does the status indicate that it’s working properly or does it indicate an error of some kind? If all of that looks good, open up Control Panel > Network Connections. Does it show “Cable disconnected” when that’s the case and correctly switch to another status when you connect an Ethernet cable (that’s also connected to a live device at the other end?) If so, is the problem simply that you’re not getting an IP address? Have you verified that some other device works properly with that same Ethernet cable plugged into that same port on the other end? The more details you can provide about what you’re seeing and what you’ve done, the more likely others will be able to help.
DCELL
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April 6th, 2019 18:00
I noticed both of those require the installing of drivers. It's best to get an adapter that is true plug & play-which doesn't require the installations of drivers, using native Windows drivers-at least initially. Running Windows Update after the initial install should install current manufacturer drivers.
jphughan
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April 7th, 2019 09:00
@DCELL, even when buying adapters that don't require manually installing drivers because they're available on Windows Update or built into Windows, that doesn't rule out the possibility of a driver issue manifesting in Device Manager. Maybe the driver didn't copy correctly when the device was first connected, or perhaps the built-in driver doesn't work at all with that particular device due to a hardware revision that was made. I've personally seen cases where drivers will happily load for a device and indicate that everything is ok, but the device still won't work properly. In one case, it was an eSATA controller where the built-in driver only saw the first disk in the chain because that driver didn't support SATA port multiplication, whereas the vendor-provided driver did. In the other case, it was an Intel RAID controller on a server, where the driver loaded and said everything was good, but none of the storage attached to that controller was visible. Using the driver from Intel resolved the issue. And then of course there's always the possibility that the built-in driver has a bug that affects someone's use case and that has been resolved by a newer release available from the vendor.