My Nforce 3 based Shuttle has a problem with overheating, which causes the network adapter to stop working until the temperature drops. This can be achieved by removing the case and using an external fan on the system.
Using what I had to hand, a Dynamode USB network adapter (Dynamode USB-NIC-1427-100) I was looking to disable the onboard network adapter and use this external USB solution instead a)because I had one laying about and b) if it worked I wouldnt have to fork out for a cheap network card.
The only problem was that the adapter didn’t plug and play with Vista and required drivers. Windows Update didn’t have any and usually using Google turns up results but not this time, just other people asking the same question as me.
Having plugged the adapter into a Windows XP computer in the hope of copying the drivers from it, the Dynamode USB NIC was identified as having a Realtek chipset: the Realtek RTL8150.
This helped with the Internet search which brought me to this unidentified chinese ftp which seems to be a repository for a whole host of Realtek drivers: ftp://210.51.181.211/cn/nic/
In the end the drivers that I am happily using on Vista Home Premium (32bit) can be found here: ftp://210.51.181.211/cn/nic/8150_INST_5_126.zip
[…] jknode wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerpt My Nforce 3 based Shuttle has a problem with overheating, which causes the network adapter to stop working until the temperature drops. This can be achieved by removing the case and using an external fan on the system. Using what I had to hand, a Dynamode USB network adapter (Dynamode USB-NIC-1427-100) I was looking to disable the onboard network adapter and use this external USB solution instead a)because I had one laying about and b) if it worked I wouldnt have to fork out for a cheap network card. The only problem was that the adapter didn’t plug and play with Vista and required drivers. Windows Update didn’t have any and usually using Google turns up results but not this time, just other people asking the same question as me. […]