WillD WillD Solved the Realtek ethernet card not showing up in Device Manager, despite the drivers being installed correctly. I read somewhere [might have been here] that by powering down the SER8, unplugging in power supply, and then holding the power button down for 20+ seconds, it would clear the motherboard capacitors.
DeepSeek AI quote "And that Realtek fix is a classic hard-reset trick. Holding the power button with the PSU unplugged drains residual charge from the capacitors on the motherboard, forcing the NIC controller to fully reinitialize. It’s one of those “works for no logical reason” fixes that’s been around since the early days of onboard Ethernet "
So, it worked! Also, I turned off the ‘Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power’ checkbox setting in the Power Management tab in Properties in the Realtek driver in the Network adapter section in Device Manager. This is also a known problem when the PC turns the adapter off.
