I am having problems with my NIC. I recently purchased an HP Pavilian PC - it came with a Realtek PCIe GBE NIC. It will randomly drop my network connection (I get a ! in my taskbar network status). If I right-click and "Troubleshoot," the problem is corrected (it is diagnosed as "The default gateway cannot be found.") Sometimes it stays fixed for hours, sometimes minutes, sometimes the problem re-appears almost immediately - the problem is very intermittent. I have 2 other PCs and 6 other non-PC devices on my network that access the Internet through the same router as this PC, and none of them are having this problem. This problem appeared when I rebuilt my PC. I am using Windows 7 64-bit Professional. When the problem presented itself (almost immediately) I was using the drivers off of HP's site (v7.45.516.2011), and so I went to the Realtek website to see if there were newer drivers. There were, and I installed v7.53.216.2012. This did not correct my problem. I am using Norton Internet Security, and I have tried disabling it's firewall and using the built-in Windows Firewall. That did not correct the problem. I tried turning off the Windows Firewall as well and going without to see if that would fix it -- it did not. I've made the mistake of paying $99 to AnswerDesk.com and they have not been able to resolve my problem. I also contacted HP, and of course, after 3 minutes on the phone, their default answer is that I need to do a System Restore (returning my PC to factory condition). I also tried emailing Realtek, and they sent me like a 3-line response saying that it's probably my network (it doesn't even look like they read my problem description). Doing some searches, I've seen others with this problem with varying hardware and OSs (appears to have been a problem for some people in Vista, too), but I have not seen many, if any solutions, and certainly none that are applicable to me. Help! :-(

Do you actually lose internet connectivity?. Just asking because I have seen a number of Windows 7 PCs reporting local connectivity only (the ! icon) when they actually have full internet connectivity. I haven't found a solution for this.

Hi, First lets understand why yellow exclamation mark will be appear on network and sharing center icon, it uses this mechanism: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee126135(WS.10).aspx NCSI is designed to be responsive to network conditions, so it examines the connectivity of a network in a variety of ways. For example, NCSI tests connectivity by trying to connect to http://www.msftncsi.com, a simple Web site that exists only to support the functionality of NCSI. For your symptom, I suggest to perform these tests to solve the issue: 1 Turn off NCSI in group policy: Computer Configuration\Administrative Templates\System\Internet Communication Management\ Internet Communication settings. Double-click Turn off Windows Network Connectivity Status Indicator active tests, and then click Disable. 2 Reset Winsock Windows sockets settings may get corrupted due to the installation of networking software, or perhaps due to Malware infestation. Try resetting Winsock entries to its default installation. 1Go to Start, type cmd and press Enter. 2Type: netsh winsock reset catalog in the command prompt and press Enter. 3 Reset TCP/IP stack to installation defaults. TCP/IP can sometimes become damaged or corrupted. If you cannot connect to the Internet and you have tried the above method to resolve the problem, TCP/IP might be causing it. How to reset Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) http://support.microsoft.com/kb/299357 4 Update Network Card driver to the latest version. Hope that helps. Regards, Leo HuangLeo Huang TechNet Community Support