No Network Adapter Detected

Jacs10 said:

I have Windows 10 upgraded from 8.1 with Bitdefender 2015. After an automatic update my network adapters on wireless and LAN simply stopped working. I tried Bitdefender repair which corrected the issue until next restart. After completely uninstalling Bitdefender and reinstalling, everything works. Thanks for all the advice, very useful.

I am able to access the internet most of the time but my network adapter quits functioning several times a day and I have to run the Windows diagnostics then power cycle my router to get it working again. I upgraded from Windows 7. There is something called Windows Defender installed but I do not see Bitdefender. Are these the same thing? I do not see an uninstaller for Windows Defender.

philiphall said:

Are these the same thing?

No. Windows Defender is a built-in part of Windows 10. It can be turned off but not uninstalled.
Bitdefender produces third-party security products e.g. Internet Security 2015

I confirm the Antivirus Program as the culprit. In my case it has been Kaspersky Version 15. After upgrading to KIS 16 all LAN NICs were on the network adapter list and working fine.
NIC concerned: RealTek PCIe GBE and Intel I210-T1.
By the way, RaLink 802.11n Wireless was up and running all the time. Fortunately!

I found that W10-pro is behaving different from W10-home. W10-pro is allowed to run GPedit.exe to control a lot of settings by hand. W10- home is not allowed to run it.
One would think that W10-pro is better? Well I find W10-home is far more relaxed and working like the old W7-pro in matters of sharing and IP-connections.

Same problem but after a smooth upgrade. Upgraded to Windows 10 from Windows 7 back in August. Everything was fine until recently. Windows does not detect the NIC the first time. I have to restart the machine in order for it to recognize the NIC. Sometimes I get the error msg start menu and cotrana are not working.

The question remains over here as I see that W10-home is showing me on mouseclick all devices in the home network and W10-pro is searching and searching and after a while only finds its own shared folder.
Calling Microsoft Netherlands they told me that the solution would be to downgrade to W10-home or go back to W7-pro. The latest would be the easiest as this option is build-in W10 from start on.

DaveJ100 said:

I had the same issue with the network adapters not appearing when I upgraded from 8.1 to 10. The network icon on the task bar showed a red 'X' and the icons in the control panel settings were missing. Device Manager showed that my Realtek card was installed and working properly but I had no internet connection. I tried various solutions on other sites but they didn't work.

My issue turned out to be down to Kaspersky Internet Security 2015. Once I uninstalled it the task bar icon changed to the yellow '!' mark and then showed it was connected. The network adapter icon also reappeared in the control panel settings. I then installed Kaspersky again and all is working well.

For anyone else with this issue try uninstalling any antivirus / security software before doing a clean install as it might not be necessary. You can then reinstall your antivirus / security software if it solves the problem.

I have spent days trying to solve this problem. And you are the only one to suggest KIS2015 was the root cause. I uninstalled it and my Netgear A6210 dongle worked straightaway! Thank you.

I too lost my network adapter. and hence my wi-fi. I restored to a previous date and now my adapter and wifi is working again. This is not the first time my adapter disappeared. I suspect it will happen again some time. Anybody got a permanent fix?

Yesterday I was surfing on my Acer 10" 2 in one without any issues. Today, No network Adapter to be found and I am getting error code 45 that the Network adapter is not properly installed. So what do I do if there is no rollback option?

As soon as I deleted the Kapersky Internet software my realtech card appeared. I didn't even have to reboot.