[Lex224]

Hi all.

I have a Micronet Wireless LAN PCI Adapter (Realtek 8185) to use with my PC, but it's given me lots of trouble in the past and I had it gathering dust on a shelf for a while.

A couple days ago, I felt the need to re-format my PC so that it was running fast and didn't have all the useless software I had on it, and I thought it might be a good idea to try out the wireless card again to see if it worked. Since I successfully reinstalled Windows and such, and let Windows install a driver for the wireless card, it's worked perfectly.

Now, last night (and this won't be the problem I don't think but it's worth mentioning) we had a power cut and even after the power came back on, my PC wasn't getting enough power to start-up, until I tried it this morning.

My PC started up just fine but now the wireless card was having issues connecting to the internet. At first, it was saying that Windows couldn't detect the proxy. After resetting the adapter the internet would work for about 2 minutes before the same problem happened.

This was the same problem that I've had with the adapter before, but I don't get why it's suddenly happened now, when it was working perfectly before. I tried to uninstall the drivers for it and get ones from the internet but nothing has worked. I've tried versions for Win7, Vista and even XP and they all seem to come across the same problem.

I thought that a system restore would fix the issue as I could go back to yesterday when it was working. Wrong. It's still acting up.

What could be the issue? I have no idea what it could be. I didn't install anything yesterday or run any updates and such either.

I rarely go on forums to ask for help as I can normally Google the issue and fix things myself, but I've searched around lots and although I find some people with the same sort of issues, the fixes that others reply with don't work.

Sorry for the length of this, I felt the need to include everything here.

System is running on Windows 7 64 bit.

Thanks in advance for any help!

 

[Lex224]

OK I've literally spent all day trying to fix this and I eventually have, although it still remains a mystery why it stopped working.

I found the same wireless adapter on Amazon and saw a negative review say that the card doesn't support WPA (which is what my router uses) so I changed to use WEP. It connected successfully although it was very very slow so I decided to see what would happen if I reset the router. Strangely enough, the connection is now fine as it was before this morning and it's using the routers original WPA password.

Why would the router be the problem here though, when there are a good few other devices such as laptops and my PS3 that have always connected to it just fine, even today after my PC's connection got screwed?

Will I just have to keep resetting the router every time this happens or is there a potential fix here? I have a LAN cable I have used to replace the wireless but the wire has to get in the way of a couple of rooms which really isn't an option any more.

Anybody with a suggestion to why this happened?

 

[montiaro]

Yes, that wireless NIC does not support WPA. The reason that the WPA password might work with the WEP password might be because they could be the same. The other devices might of connected correctly to the router while this device was having trouble so in turn you ended up having no internet access.
If you are looking for the drivers you should be able to find them here:
Realtek

 

[Lex224]

The WEP password was different from WPA password though.

I've ended up re-formatting the PC again as I messed up other drivers in the process of trying to fix the wireless adapter and because it was so soon after the previous formatting, it was quick enough.

Of course it doesn't work again! I'll try to change to WEP and back to WPA again to see if that works as it did earlier today.

The link you supplied doesn't seem to be valid though I'll assume it's from the Realtek site. Previously today I tried a variety of drivers, including official Realtek ones, and they didn't seem to make any difference. Maybe it's just an issue with Windows 7?

 

[montiaro]

The link to the realtek site for the driver was:
http://www.realtek.com/downloads/downloadsView.aspx?Langid=1&PFid=1&Level=6&Conn=5&ProdID=35&DownTypeID=3&GetDown=false&Downloads=true#351
Also, that wireless NIC should not support WPA according to the realtek site. If you want to use that wireless NIC I suggest buying a up to date wireless NIC or use WEP.