Precision M3800 USB LAN Issue

check Realtek for updated driver.

I use USB-Gigabit Ethernet LAN dongles myself. Fortunately mine has the ASIX chipset.

Thanks for the suggestion.

The user did say they'd checked the driver revisiosn 2/3 weeks ago (along with the BIOS) using the driver update utility on the Dell website but I'll be rechecking again today/tomorrow. Then I guess it's try Realtek directly.

The drivers were checked using the Update Utility on the Dell support website, navigated to using the machine's service tag. That's one of my main reasons for buying Dells. Finding drivers for other major brands is a ROYAL PAIN. One of the worst is HP (who used to be good). If you have a non US/UK machine you will often only find the drivers on the website for the specifc region that machine was sold in. And if that happened to be Portugal (as it was in my case) the rest of the HP sites claim the machine doesn't even exist - helpful NOT! They won't even recognise the serial or full model number. And HP wonder why their PC business went down the toilet.

It is just a rather strange problem. Sometimes it sees it as USB 3 for a while, then it will only recognise it as USB 2. He's also been through all the USB hub power settings.

Next stop if none of those provides a solution would be to escalate directly to Dell and buy a different USB3 gigabit LAN adapter. Bit of a pain, though some research has shown the M3800 to have a variety of USB related issues.

I don't understand why they are checking Dell's website for driver updates for the USB-Gigabit Ethernet dongle.  Is the dongle a Dell product?

What is exactly your client doing that he knows that the USB 3.0 is not working at its full potential?

The USB LAN adaptor is supplied by Dell as standard with the M3800 because it has NO LAN port on it. It is not supplied in any packaging other than Dells, it not marked "Realtek", so I think that it qualifies as a Dell product when it comes to drivers. It is no different to the built in NIC on a desktop (or the built in WiFi on the M3800, also RealTek I think) - it doesn't have Dell's chipset but you still go to Dell first for the drivers.

Besides it is not clear if, at the moment, the issue is with the USB dongle itself, the LAN dongle's drivers (which Dell have built into their base M3800 Windows build), or some other general issue with USB on the M3800.

Using a USB 3.0 thumb drive, does he get the "This device will perform faster if connected to a USB 3.0..." message?

Has he tried the dongle on both USB 3 ports?

Also, I hope he is aware that one of the USB ports on the right is USB 2.0

He's not a client, this is internal to our company.

First off when running some LAN speed tests he found he was getting way below what he would expect on gigabit.

Second, quite often Windows would come up with the warning of "This device will perform faster if connected to a USB 3.0..." if he unplugged the dongle and plugged it back in.

Third, using a utility such as USB TreeView he could see that a lot of the time it was not being recognised as a USB 3.0 device.

It happens which ever USB port he plugs it into. I'll double check but IIRC all of the USB ports on his M3800 are marked SS. That is one of the first things we checked - unless you are saying one of them is marked wrongly.

That is a good suggestion re. trying a USB 3.0 external hard drive. That may help narrow it down to a possible M3800 USB problem, a RealTek dongle/driver issue, or an interaction between the two. At the moment the only USB3.0 HD on site is plugged into a server to do bare metal backups. I'll take one of mine in when I'm there on Thursday (working on our other site tomorrow).

Probably also worth trying it in one of the USB 3.0 ports on an Optiplex desktop, see if that reliably recognises it.

At the moment we haven't ruled out that the dongle itself may be faulty, but Dell will want to have eliminated driver issues first.

Thanks for the HD suggestion - I'll definitely give that a try as we've not got any USB 3.0 thumb drives.

The Dell tech spec for the M3800 states a USB 2.0 port on the right hand side.

Are you confusing the Thunderbolt connector?

It does have a USB 2.0 on the right hand side, alongside one of it's three USB 3.0 ports. The other two are on the left hand side. The problem is when the LAN dongle is in the USB 3.0 ports - which are clearly marked with the "SS" USB 3.0 symbol, where as the USB 2.0 isn't. That was the very first thing I checked.

No we are definitely not confusing it with a Thunderbolt connector. The M3800 doesn't have Thunderbolt, which is an Apple thing. You are confusing it with the M3800's Mini Display Port, which happens to use the same connector as Thunderbolt 1 and 2, but is a totally different interface.

I suppose it was a fair question to ask... but my level of experience is (I would hope) rather above that.

One of our other users though (not an IT person!) did manage to plug a USB mouse into the RJ45 LAN port on the back of one of our older laptops!

Also, while I was working in 3rd Level Desktop/Server support for one very well known UK private bank some years ago (when NT4 ruled the desktop), one of the second level support people did ask me "which is the serial port?" while pointing to the back of one of the bank's Latitude CPxH series laptops. So I helpfully pointed it out - after picking my jaw off the floor as this person claimed to be an MCSE!