Ethernet not working

[mike3526]

So I randomly woke up one day and I noticed my ethernet wasnt working but my wifi was. I assumed the plug was unplugged but it wasnt. So i troubleshot the problem and it came up with the issue that the window socket registry entries required for network connectivity are missing. So I did basic troubleshooting. Made sure the driver was updated, reset the winsocket in the command prompt along with the tcp/ip. I then tried to manually delete the winsocket off the computer and reinstalling it but i was unable to because the group policy didnt allow me to. I finally gave up and just factory restored my laptop hoping that it would work again and sadly it did not. So im stuck here and after a little bit more investigating I found out that there isnt an updated driver for windows 10 for my ethernet driver. But then I found numerous accounts of people just using the driver for windows 8 and that seemed to work for them but it didnt work for me. I havent tried using the winsockets from window 8. because my computer upgrades from 7 to 10. Any other possible solutions? My driver is Qualcomm Atheros AR8161 PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet Controller (NDIS 6.30) version 2.1.0.21

[mike3526]

bump

[DaveLembke]

You might have better luck with buying a cheap $15-$20 USB to RJ45 ethernet adapter that supports Windows 10 and go that route. From system restore back to factory original non windows 10 OS, did this adapter run fine up until Windows 10 upgrade?

Its not uncommon for an older computer to not have drivers for Windows 10. I have a laptop myself that is running 7 and I went to accept the upgrade and it came back and told me that my chipset is too out of date to support 10. Windows 10 is not perfect for detecting and flagging all incompatible hardware/devices. To the OS it could say the Ethernet Chip initialized correctly with say a legacy driver, and yet be non functional.