Monday, October 7, 2013

Atheros L1 Gigabit Ethernet on windows 8 disconnects

I have a P5KC Asus motherboard which comes with a Gigabit adapter onboard. The problem is that Asus has stopped support of the MoBo since Vista and my machine is perfectly fit to run win 8 (actually I just got 8.1 and I remembered to do this post). Windows 8 detects vendor id 1969 and device id 1048 as Atheros L1 Gigabit Ethernet 10/100/1000Base-T Controller, but I had the problem of the network being disconnected after a few file transfers or video streams.

To be more precise, the problem was originally reported to me as the computer loosing his network connectivity after random time (mainly during streaming movies to the media player). The quick and dirty solution given at that point (while having guests and fresh pop-corn), was to disable and re-enable the adapter and the network would resume just fine till the end of the movie.

The only driver I could find in Asus was Attansic L1 Driver and Utility WHQL V2.0.6000.0 for Windows 32/64bit Vista, which causes windows 8 to show you the renewed BSOD (the one with the sad smiley :p).

When I finally found the time to solve the issue I found a related issue on windows 7 and someone proposed the following:
Go to your Device Manager. Right click on your network card (under Network Adapters) and select the 'Advanced' tab. Select 'Task Offload' from the list and change the 'Value' to off.


This almost did the trick for me as I also had to disable "Flow control" for my adapter to work properly.
Hope this saves some of your time.

14 comments:

Remco said...

Thanks for your blog, you solved my problem.
Just installed Windows 8.1 Enterprise last thursday on my new SSD and had weird network problems past few days.

Unknown said...

i had the same issue on p5kpl-vm and win 8.1.
i just disabled task offload just a minute before find your post that confirmed me i was right :)

this solution also worked for me.

cheers :)

Anonymous said...

Thanks!!! I'll give it a try!!!

Ethernet Service said...

Informative Article on Ethernet Services.

T1 Line Pricing said...

I really liked the post on the topic of Atheros L1 Gigabit Ethernet on windows 8 disconnects.

Raoul Teeuwen said...

Thanks. I bought an Asus P2M2A690C that has an Attansic / Atheros L1, and after i switched XP with Windows 8, i found sometimes Windows did not see the network card anymore... And than suddenly it would be there again. Hope your config changes will work for my config as well :-)

Raoul Teeuwen said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Anonymous said...

i had the same problem with Asus P5KPL-VM . thanks

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Anonymous said...

My computer is an Asus with a Broadcom 802.11n Network Adapter and a Qualcomm Atheros AR8162/8166/8168 PCI-E Fast Ethernet Controller (NDIS 6.30). My computer, ever since it got automatically updated from Windows 8 to 8.1, it cannot connect via wifi to the primary network of my home although it can connect to a secondary internet connection I have from a different ISP. I have tried to solve the problem following your instructions however, I cannot find the "Task Offload" in the advanced tab of Wualcomm Atheros. All I can see is:
ARP offload,
ECMA,
Energy Efficient Ethernet,
Flow Control,Interrupt Moderation,
IPv4 Checksum Offload (IPv4),
Large Send Offload (IPv4),
Large Send Offload v2(IPv4)
Large Send Offload (IPv6),
Max IRQ per Second,
Network Access,
NS offload,
Receive Buffers,
Shutdown Wake Up,
Speed & Duplex,
TCP Checksum Offload (IPv4),
TCP Checksum Offload (IPv6),
Transmit Buffers,
UDP Checksum Offload (IPv4),
UDP Checksum Offload (IPv6),
VLAN ID, Wake on magic packet,
Wake on pattern match.
Does any of them correspond to what you are referring to? I would be very grateful to anyone who would be kind enough to help me as not being able to connect to my wifi is driving me nuts...!

Unknown said...

I was also suffering from the same problem. And you solved it also.
Thanks a lot. My mother boad is ASUS P5KPL-VM.

Anonymous said...

Worked for ASUS P5KPL-VM with Windows 10. Thanks a lot.

Unknown said...

Worked on latest Windows 10 64-bits. Thanks a million, My colleague finally stopped moaning all the time :) .

Anonymous said...

Latest driver version for L1 is 2.4.7.29
http://web.archive.org/web/20110618083757/http://partner.atheros.com/Drivers.aspx
view-source:http://archive.is/nJPox

Besides, the problem I had on my AR8121 seems not dissimilar from this.