Thus no internet.

I am on the old computer now as a result. It works fine on that.

Was out this morning and somebody was 'playing fatebuk' when the computer crashed for the first time ever. It all loaded back up and scans show everything is fine except that it cannot detect the cable for the internet.

Restored the computer to it's last good configuration (last night) and still cannot detect the ethernet cable.

Checked device manager and yup, a yellow exclamation mark and 'Realtek PCIe GBE Family Controller. Windows cannot load the drivers required for this device (code 31)'

Click to update to see what would happen, tells me the drivers are up to date.

Another tab on the device manager tells me that Windows cannot load this driver.

Plug in the ethernet, nothing happens, cannot detect any available network. Plug it into this (separate computer) and bing, perfect.

I would guess..... try to download the driver from realtek's site on this computer, try to save to a usb, then try to uninstall the the current driver and install the downloaded one from the USB.

Any other ideas or knowledge on the subject?

Ok worth a shot DriverEasy is a free program that detects drivers within your pc and allows you to download albeit a tad slow, but fixed my drivers whereas the acer download site didn't help at all.

Could be a failed network card... See if you can download a Realtek diagnostics utility to check the NIC... If it's dead, they are cheap to replace with whatever you can pickup at your local computer shop...

I did what my logic told me to do.

"I would guess..... try to download the driver from realtek's site on this computer, try to save to a usb, then try to uninstall the the current driver and install the downloaded one from the USB."

And all done, I back on my new computer again.

Realtek's site was good. D/L the version for my OS, copy to USB. Transfer to the other computer. Uninstall current driver, install updated driver from downloaded file. All done automatically from that point on.

So what caused it in the first place ?

Drivers don't just modify / delete themselves. I suspect it's somehow malware related.

Possibly Tudd.

Have yet to really go through it.