USB ethernet adapter does not work

Her computer is also Windows 10. It does not have a wired lan port, only wifi. That is why all this is happening. She is working in an area of the store with weak wifi reception. Due to the laptop not having a lan port I am trying to use this usb adapter is to get her on a wired connection.

I think I will start from the beginning by uninstalling the device and have the computer re-find it. If that does not work, I do have the official driver. Instead of having Windows automatically find it as I did before I will manually direct it to find it.

Hi there

even if the computer DID have a LAN port you can still use another one say on a USB-->ethernet connector .

You can have as many ethernet ports as you need. There's no universal law about a computer only being able to connect to one network !!!! -- setting up things like Internet browsing etc will be slightly trickier but not a problem -- I use one LAN for my internal network and the other LAN (have 2 on my main machine) as Internet via proxy and gateway.

The main problem might be that you haven't got the correct USB-->ethernet driver. Sometimes also with these systems if you are using a USB connector for LAN, disable the internal wifi adpator -- don't uninstall -- go to adapter settings and just disable the wifi. (You can easily re-enable it again if you need to).

Also once the driver is installed correctly you might need to enable the LAN adaptor.

Cheers
jimbo

Hi Jimbo,

I understand. I want to start all over today with it. Do I just go in to Device Manager and uninstall it? I want to be able to plug the USB ethernet adapter in to the port and have it ask the Network Location all over again. I will certainly install the correct driver as well.

SJMaye said:

Hi Jimbo,

I understand. I want to start all over today with it. Do I just go in to Device Manager and uninstall it? I want to be able to plug the USB ethernet adapter in to the port and have it ask the Network Location all over again. I will certainly install the correct driver as well.

Hi there

@SJMaye
That's probably the best option -- remember also control panel still works too !!!




Cheers
jimbo

Oh yeah, I know control panel still works. As much as it appear MS doesn't want us to use it. Seems to be getting buried further and further in to the background.

At the beginning of this thread there were several suggestions that it may be that the computer was set or thought it was on a public network. Upon reading the suggested links it really did not help. Regardless, I could not see why the network adapter would not get an IP address and connect to the internet regardless of whether it was setup on a Public or Private network. When I started to reply to your post here I had a look at mine. It was set on Public and I have perfect access to the internet.



I think I set it that way at the time because I was not sure I wanted network discovery and did not care about file sharing- at that time. I set it to private just now.

So, I am back to the same question- Why would setting the network location to Public preclude the computer's access to the internet?

Hi there

@SJMaye

Only Ms probably would know about that !!!

Could be firewalls, port restrictions,file sharing restrictions etc etc. Don't forget there's often stuff hidden away in router settings too that might enable access in one case and inhibit it in the other.

Since I invariably use Linux for Internet browsing and file / network sharing in general and it just works straight out of the box with SAMBA I treat any sort of success with Windows Networking as something akin to magic or alchemy. !!

I don't think I've ever had consistent 100% working with networking on Windows first time - on any release going back as far as I can remember - and these days every update seems to break something again on at least 1 Windows computer on my LAN !!!!. My 2 NAS systems (CENTOS 7) just work and work and work - no problems !!!

Cheers
jimbo

@SJMaye,

Sorry for not keeping up here, been very busy the last few days.

You have the right idea to uninstall the USB adapter then go about letting Windows re-discover it. That process should find a connections including the one your looking for and then ask if you want to have the device discoverable to networks. If you say no here the connection will be made Public and File and Printing sharing will be turned off. You would still be able to connect the internet but not other computers or devices for sharing purposes. Other devices on the connection would not be able to discover the device either. This means that functionality will suffer.

If you answer yes than the connection becomes Private and sharing is enabled and provides better functionality.

I went back, uninstalled and rediscovered the USB adapter. This time I made sure to select private network. Low and behold it worked!

Thank you all for your help!