Ethernet cable not recognized after W7 wakeup (T400)

Hi,

I am running my internet using an Ethernet cable connected to the school network. It works fine until my T400 goes to sleep. After wake-up, it claims there is no cable connected even though the cable is plugged in. No lights are on next to the socket, and the adapter simply doesn't recognize the cable.

I have tried the following with no success:

• Reboot
• Disable/enable adapter in Network & Sharing Center
• Unplugging/replugging several times
• Updating driver

The only way to make it work again is a combination of frustrated rebooting/unplugging and waiting a while/disabling & enabling the adapter, etc. Usually it goes on again finally when I plug the cable back in.

My specs are: 2.8 Ghz, 3 gig ram, 250 gb HDD, fingerprint reader etc, Windows 7 Ultimate.

This only happens to the LAN card, not the WLAN.

Any idea whats wrong?

 

how about updating the bios, have you tried that?

 

No not really, there is a new update out so maybe I should give it a try. It said it only added support for some new computers so I thought it wasn't necessary.

 

How is the LAN Driver working? If it is working, then I suggest that you download the latest Intel Gigabit Driver from Lenovo and see from there. If Im not mistaken, Intel released a newer LAN Driver early this year and are available from MS and Lenovo.

 

I have tested this for some time now and have more details. I did update my lan driver, but I downloaded it from intel directly instead of Lenovo.

When I put my computer to sleep with the LAN cable connected, the computer sometimes doesn't recognize the cable when waking up many hours later. If I restart, disable the ethernet, reinstall the drivers, etc, it does not make a difference. The following two solutions were tried after 2 hours of inability to connect, and reinstalling, rebooting, disabling, etc.
The ONLY ways so far to make the computer recognize the cable are:
1 - Go to my neighbor and plug in his LAN into my Ethernet card. My computer immediately recognizes the cable and acquires a connection. After unplugging and going back to my room, my computer also recognizes my cable right away.
2 - Tell my other neighbor (anyone will do ) to come over to my room with their laptop. They plug in my cable that hasn't been recognized for 2 hours and get an immediate working connection. They unplug, and after plugging into my computer again, I can also connect once again.

I am connected to a school network in a student residence, so I simply have a socket on the wall where I insert the LAN cable. It seems that something somewhere in my Ethernet card needs to be reset and get new 1s and 0s, and after that it can connect again. I don't know this stuff too well, what do YOU think?

EDIT: Should mention I have updated BIOS, LAN drivers, and wireless drivers. I have also updated drivers during the "downtime", rebooted, uninstalled and reinstalled the card, and any combination of them. Even if I uninstall and reinstall the ethernet card, it won't recognize the cable until doing step 1 or 2 above.

 

Especially with windows 7, I'd imagine you shouldnt even have bothered with downloading special drivers, and most certainly not for something like ethernet which I am sure works out of the box and should be all supported.

I duno, try deleting or disabling the network adapter driver in device manager, and try installing a windows suggested one or one pulled from the thinkpad drivers matrix.

 

Already tried, this problem started when running on Win 7 drivers so switching to the newest ones from intel is just my most recent attempt. I think I have found the problem however and it seems to be related to Wake-on-lan. The network seems to be sending wakeup calls because I noticed as soon as I put it to sleep it wakes up in closed position a few minutes later with lan light flashing. Unplugging the cable be4 sleep seems to have done the trick for now.

 

You should be able to disable wake on LAN in the system BIOS.