I am sending your report to the factory engineers. Could you be more specific about the identification for your network connection? The driver information does not match the Intel(R) 82567LM Gigabit Network Connection. Do you possibly have an Intel(R) 82567LM-3 or 82577 Gigabit Network Connection?
Do your connection issues happen after the computer wakes up from sleep? If yes, as a temporary work around and to help narrow down the problem, you might try disabling allowing the computer and the connection from going to sleep.
If I think of any else for you to try, I will post it here.
Mark H
It is the Intel(R) 82567LM-3. The machine does not go to sleep. I think that it happens after a period of the computer logged off. If I reboot the computer will show at 100MB. If I connect to it several hours later, it will then show 10MB.
Same issue here on Optiplex 960 with 82567LM-3. Connecting to Dell PowerConnect 2824 web-managed gigabit switch. Connection often drops for 2 seconds, then comes back up but sometimes only at 10 Mbps.
Latest Dell driver is 11.5.4.0, installed from the start and has errors. Updating to 10.5.10.0 11.5.10.0 direct from Intel site seems to have helped. No drops in 24 hours and seems to be maintaining 1 Gbps.
Saw this thread about SIPS but can't find that setting in adapter properties:
http://communities.intel.com/message/72773
Still fighting some logon/group policy errors on machine startup. Not sure if these are related to network connectivity.
Mark Berry
MCB Systems
Message was edited by: mcbsys - corrected driver version
P.S. Forgot to mention I've installed 32-bit Windows 7 Enterprise.
Spoke too soon. e1kexpress just lost connection, resumed 2 seconds later at 10Mbps.
OK, I am glad to hear I am not the only one experiencing this. I was pretty sure that it was an overall issue. There must be driver issues. we need to get more info from Intel on this. Dell is clueless. I called and they claimed not to have any report of this. I find it hard to believe.
What model Dell switch do you have? Gigabit or 10/100? Managed or unmanaged?
I'm using a new PowerConnect 2824. Since I'm also seeing Netlogon 5719 errors, I found this article which talks about setting Spanning Tree to "portfast" mode:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/247922
So I went into the switch web interaface and found Switch > Spanning Tree > STP Port Settings > Fast Link and checked that. Not really sure what this means or why "Fast" isn't the default. It seemed to help at first but then the 5719 errors returned. Anyway my current theory is that there is some combination of driver and switch port handshaking and Windows 7 fast-startup processing that isn't happening fast enough.
Not sure if this is a Windows 7 thing or an OptiPlex 960 thing. Two OptiPlex 755s with gigabit ports and Windows XP are not not reporting problems.
Mark Berry
MCB Systems
I have a Dell 3348 managed switch. Personally, I think it is a bum driver for the NIC.
bbazian,
At one point I uninstalled the NIC driver and on reboot, Win7 automatically re-installed version 10.5.1.0, I guess the Win7 PnP default. Since I was also having the drop-out problems with 11.5.4.0 (the latest from Dell), I am going to try explicitly rolling back to 10.5.1.0 and see if the issue continues. If you can spare a machine to try that on, I'd be interested to compare results.
Mark Berry
MCB Systems
I can give that a shot but I know that when I 1st got the computers the driver that shipped with the computer was worse then after I upgraded. The upgrade did make it a bit better as far as disconnects.
I rolled a PC back to the MS default install as you did. We will see what happens. It is a PC I do not have in production at this time so I can leave it a connect to it later to see the status.
I rolled back to 10.5.1.0 on 1/11 about 6:30pm.
As of 1/12 10:10am, no dropouts.In fact, no messages from e1kexpress at all. Speed is 1.0Gbps.
Mark Berry
MCB Systems
So far I too have not seen any drop outs but that can be that the MS driver does not report like the Intel one?? I have not done this on a production machine yet so I do not know if it will cause any issues. On the production machines when I 1st got the machine, AIM kept on disconnecting. That was my 1st clue that there was an issue. I may bite the bullit tomorrow and do this to the production computer.
I have the exact same issue, reported in this thread:
http://communities.intel.com/message/80336#80336
My believe is that the SIPS functionality disconnects the link because of power saving reasons.
This following datasheet has some nice info regarding the SIPS functionality for the 82567LM:
http://download.intel.com/design/network/datashts/82567.pdf
I've opened a case at HP (we're using the 82567 in HP DC7900's) but so far they haven't come up with anything usefull. I think this issue can be resolved if the SIPS feature can be managed through drivers and/or pro set utilties.
By the way, if you install an older driver without SIPS functionality, the link disconnect doesn't appear...If you want I can look up the driver version witch I tested this on. Also, SIPS has to "detect" inactivity. So when you disable the monitor standby setting from the OS power management, SIPS won't kick in. That's my current workaround...
