Atheros L1 Gigabit Ethernet Card disconnects in Windows 7

I’m running Windows 7 on an Asus P5K motherboard with a Atheros L1 Gigabit NIC.

Since I’m on Windows 7 RTM (build 7600) my Atheros L1 Gigabit Ethernet Card behave like a drunken man. The network card fell a sleep when it had to much 🙂 When transfering large amounts of data, the network card would disconnect. My workaround was to “disable/enable” the network card. But here is a permanent solution.

Open Device Manager ->Right click on the drunken Atheros Network Card and choose Properties. Click on Advanced tab, highlight Task Offload and set the value to Off.

Atheros networkcard issue in Windows 7

Reboot and the problem is history.

btw Never had these ‘disconnects’ on Windows 7 Beta or RC.  Also I tried some drivers for the Atheros NIC, but none of them seam to solve this bug. Currently I’m on Atheros driver version 2.4.7.27 Whatever, it’s fixed 🙂

18 thoughts on “Atheros L1 Gigabit Ethernet Card disconnects in Windows 7

  1. chumppi

    Thanks! Worked perfectly. I just re-installed to Windows 7 x64 from RC, I remember installing old Windows 2000 drivers for the Atheros L1 Gigabit device to get it working, didn’t find those this time so I had to google the problem and that solved it 🙂

  2. Peter

    Thank you so much ! I have tried reinstalling the driver. Newer, older XP driver. Nothing has improved. But this option is very good !!!

  3. Ludek

    Hello dude, I spent more than half year to solve problem with USB disc connected through USB server, changing everything; this article finally solved this problem. Thanks a lot!
    My Atheros was having problem only for usb server – maybe it can help also to someone else.

  4. Roderick

    Excellent post, I’m so glad I found it, as it solved my Atheros L1 problem. Thank you very very much.
    Cheers,
    Roderick.

  5. Kiki

    Thank you so much! It was driving me nuts but your fix seems to have solved the problem. Thanks so much for sharing 🙂

  6. kirayaa

    Oh, my God thank you so much you have saved my life that I could not resist Thanks!

  7. Davi

    That really helped a lot!
    Had no idea about this option… ;P

    After finding this article, I found out what is the problem… Actually the “task offload” options, simply allows the hardware on the network adapter to do some calculations, like tcp checksum or other functions, like it is explained here:
    (http://msdn.microsoft.com/pt-br/library/windows/hardware/ff570925%28v=vs.85%29.aspx)

    The idea is very good… The only problem is that, either because of buggy software or hardware, the network adapter is unable to handle the tasks sent to it… So it simply crashes, with no error message whatsoever… =P

  8. Carsten Giesen

    Many many many thanks.
    I have this problem on one client, always when I open an XLS file. XLSX work fine, DOC too.
    I search for every thing, for virus, for firewall…. for hours
    Than I have a look again to eventlog and see the network card….
    Google do the rest….

  9. disconcision

    thanks. i can confirm this is still helping people out in 2013.

  10. Tam

    Last comment i read there said its still helping ppl in 2013. Aye well im in March 2014 and just appplied this after it driving me bananananananaz as for jon i took on i had something like 4TB to move in/out in a couple of days fixing half a dozen or so computers.

    Except it was *mine* giving the grief.

    Imagine how long disabling/enabling that would have took if it crashed every 100mb? Simply wouldn’t have. Was considering buying an external drive just for this job. Or wireless with all that data (shudder).

    May songs be sung and carried shoulder high everywhere for the original discoverer Ben.

    After applying and rebooting its at 8gb without a single drop. Hurrah.

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