Most of us have ever faced network adapter driver issue on Windows 7, 8 or 10, which can cause some network connection problems. The problem is common when you update Windows systems or have ignored to update the network driver for a long time. In this case, what we need do first is to.
I recently needed an Ethernet adapter for my laptop, which has USB and WiFi (of course) but no Ethernet. Somebody offered me an. I figured Windows would offer the driver automatically, after which I could use the computer in places where only wired networks were available. Well, I plugged it in, and no such luck! Windows 10 Enterprise x64 recognized the hardware, but said it couldn't find a driver for it. I tried searching online (connected over Wi-Fi), and found a bunch of people by somebody using the alias “Tnkgrl.” Unfortunately, the is no longer pointing to anything! I also searched Apple’s site, but couldn’t find any Windows drivers: Maybe they’re included in Bootcamp but not available for download?
Anybody know how to get this device working in Windows? I did a little more hunting online and found to a blog that said they'd found the driver for the chipset in the adapter, and convinced it to work. I followed a variant on their instructions, and it worked for me too.
Here are the steps I used:. Plug in the adapter while the computer is running. Check Device Manager (you can get there by right-clicking Start). You should see a listed Apple device with a little yellow exclamation mark next to it, saying Windows can't load the driver.
Go to and find the driver for your OS. I used for 64-bit Windows 10.
Note that this is the actual driver download, not a Setup program. Download the.ZIP file.
If you use a browser that adds the 'mark of the web' (IE or Edge for sure, maybe others), right-click the downloaded ZIP, go to Properties, click Unblock (either a button or checkbox), and hit OK. Unpack the ZIP archive. You should see a folder containing four files: a.SYS file (the driver), a.CAT file (the WHQL signature), a.INF file (the driver information), and a Readme.txt. Don't do anything with these files directly, but remember where they are. Go back to Device Manager, right-click the device entry that needs the driver, and choose Update Driver Software. Choose Browse my computer for driver software. Choose Let me pick from a list of device drivers on my computer.
If there's a Have Disk. Button in the lower right, click it. Otherwise, click the top entry in the list (should be something like 'All devices') and hit OK, then click Have Disk. On the next screen. In the box labeled 'Copy manufacturer's files from:', type in or browse to the location where you unpacked the.ZIP file, then hit OK. Choose the option ASIX AX88772A USB2.0 to Fast Ethernet Adapter (on my system, it is the second option listed).
You will get an 'Update Driver Warning' or similar saying that Windows can't verify that the driver will work with your hardware, which may cause problems. Click 'Yes' anyhow, for this and any other prompts to confirm that you want to install the driver. You should now have a working Ethernet adapter! In Device Manager, it will be listed as a 'ASIX AX88772A USB2.0 to Fast Ethernet Adapter' under the 'Network adapters' category, and there should be no exclamation marks or anything like that. There you go! You can connect to a wired network, and it should work fine. The original instructions were for Windows 8 x64, and I can verify that it works on Win10 x64; I haven't tested it on other versions but the same steps should work and the download site lists drivers for tons of operating systems.
Every NIC (Network Interface Card) has a unique MAC address ( Media Access Control). This applies to all types of network cards, including Ethernet cards and WiFi cards. The MAC Address is a six-byte number or 12-digit hexadecimal number that is used to uniquely identify a host on a network. An example of a MAC address is 1F-2E-3D-4C-5B-6A and it falls into the Layer 2 networking protocol of the OSI model. In today’s networks, ARP, or Address Resolution Protocol converts a MAC address to a Layer 3 protocol address, such as an IP address.
A MAC address can also be called a Physical Address. Read my post on if you don’t know it.
All MAC addresses are hard-coded into a network card and can never be changed. However, you can change or spoof the MAC address in the operating system itself using a few simple tricks. So why would you want to change your MAC address? Well there are many reasons for this, mostly related to bypassing some kind of MAC address filter set on a modem, router or firewall.
Changing the MAC Address can help you bypass certain network restrictions by emulating an unrestricted MAC Address or by spoofing a MAC address that is already authorized. For example, a WiFi network may allow only authorized computers to connect to the network and filters out computers based on the MAC address. If you can sniff out a legitimate MAC address, you can then spoof your MAC address and gain access to the WiFi network. Another example is if you have an ISP that allows only a certain number of computers to connect to the Internet from your home.
If you have more computers that need to connect, you can spoof the MAC address of an authorized computer and connect from a different computer. Change Windows MAC Address You can change the MAC address for the network card in Windows pretty easily following the steps below. Step 1: Click on Start, then Control Panel, then Network Connections, and right-click on the network connection you want to change the MAC address for and select Properties. It will normally either be Local Area Connection or Wireless Network Connection. If you are using Windows Vista, Windows 7 or higher, you have to go to Control Panel, then Network and Internet, then Network and Sharing Center, and then click on Manage Network Connections or Change adapter settings. Then you can right-click on the adapter and choose Properties.
Step 2: On the General or Networking tab, click the Configure button. Step 3: Now click on the Advanced tab and click on the Locally Administered Address property or the Network Address property. By default, the Not Present value is selected. Go ahead and click on the Value radio button and enter in a new MAC address.
The MAC address is a combination of 6 pairs of numbers and characters, i.e. You should enter the MAC address without the dashes. You can go to the command prompt and type in IPCONFIG /ALL to check that the MAC address has been changed. Go ahead and restart the computer in order for the changes to take effect. This is the simplest way to change your MAC address in Windows. You can also do so via the registry, but it’s much more technical and probably not required by most people. Change OS X MAC Address Changing the MAC address on OS X is definitely not as easy as it is on Windows. Firstly, you have to use Terminal (similar to command prompt in Windows) to actually change the MAC address.
Secondly, you need to manually figure out the technical name of the adapter before you can change the settings. I’ll explain everything below step by step, but it gets a bit complicated at times. To start, let’s find out the current MAC address for your Mac. You can do this in one of two ways: via System Preferences or via Terminal. Open System Preferences, click on Network and then click on the Advanced button. Make sure to select the appropriate interface first (WiFi, Ethernet, etc) in the listbox on the left.
Click on the Hardware tab and you will see the first line is MAC Address. I thought you could simply choose Manually from the Configure dropdown, but that doesn’t allow you to edit the MAC address. In Terminal, you can get the MAC address by typing in the following command: ifconfig en0 grep ether This will give you the MAC address for the en0 interface. Depending on how many interfaces you have on your computer, you might need to run this command several times adding 1 to the number each time.
For example, I ran the following commands below until I reached an interface that didn’t exist. Now you can simply compare the MAC addresses listed here with the one you saw via System Preferences.
In my case, my WiFi MAC address of f8:1e:df:d8:9d:8a matches with en1, so that is the interface I have to use for the next commands. Before we change the MAC address, you can use a useful command in Terminal to generate a random MAC address if you need one.
Openssl rand -hex 6 sed ‘s/ (. )/ 1:/g; s/.$//’ Now that you have a new MAC address, you can change the current one using the following command below. Replace XX with the actual MAC address you want to use. Sudo ifconfig en0 ether xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx In order to do this, you need to be logged in as an Administrator or you have to enable the root account in OS X. By default, root is disabled and it’s better to leave it disabled if you can. Just login as an admin and you should be able to run the command just fine. It will ask you for your password, though, before changing the MAC address.
Also, the address won’t change if you are still connected to a WiFi network. You need to first disconnect from any networks and then run the command.
Surprisingly, disconnecting from a wireless network in OS X is not intuitive at all. You have to press and hold the Option key and then click on the WiFi icon to see the disconnect option. So here is a rundown of all the commands I ran in order to get the current MAC address, generate a random one, update the MAC address and then verify to make sure it had actually changed. As I mentioned earlier, this is definitely not as straightforward as the process is on Windows, but you should be able to do it if you simply copy and paste the commands above.
If you have any questions, feel free to post a comment.