Well, I finally traced down your Ethernet driver. It all revolves around some simple, key words "full featured" and "defeatured". I'm going to give you a link to something that you might want to get and save for future reference.
Here's a link to your Maintenance and Service Manual for your Series of laptops. This is a generic manual, but it covers all versions of these laptops. Oh, that key word that's so important to you? It's "full featured"!! You NEED to remember this when dealing with the obscuration that Nvidia, and HP love so well.
http://static.tigerdirect.ca/pdf/HP_...ookPC-MnSG.pdf
While digging through this document i's easy to find your particular model, if you use the key word I mentioned above. You have an AMD processor, which limits your selection to two columns in the "Product Description" section. Since you have a "Full Featured" model, you are further limited to the very first column in the left hand side.
In that section you'll find that you have the Nvidia MCP67D Northbridge Chipset. You will, also, find that you have a (embedded) Realtek RTL8211B Ethernet Network adapter. Don't go looking for a separate "driver"! You won't find one, anywhere! Embedded chips are a part of a larger chipset. By that I mean they they an integrated into a large IC, In this case the Nvidia MCP67D Northbridge Chipset.
Now that we know the Main Chipset the drivers are fairly easy to find. BUT, the Ethernet drivers included in that download do NOT include the correct Ethernet driver for you machine. Why? Good question, I don't have an answer.
To get the Ethernet driver for your device you must download this file from Nvidia: - - File size = 88,614 KB
http://us.download.nvidia.com/Window...glish_whql.exe
INSIDE of this archive you will find a sub directory call "Ethernet". Extract these files to a directory of your choice. Then to "update" your current drivers for this device go to the Device Manager select the driver tab. Select the appropriate method for a manual update, and when it asks you where you want to search for drivers? Point it to the directory where you extracted the above drivers.
If everything goes right? In less than a minute you'll have an updated and functional Ethernet device. UNFORTUNATELY, Nvidia was NOT very "creative" in it's name conventions!
Your device will STILL be named the same thing. Just plug it into a local LAN and it should work just fine.
HTH
Bill