Missing Ethernet Driver 😢

[taymouch]

Hi everyone
Longtime Windows Vista lover here
I’m currently setting up a Fujitsu PC(Esprimo E710) and of course I have installed Vista Ultimate *64 on it.
Everything is going pretty smoothly so far but I’ve hit one major roadblock. I can't find the Ethernet Driver.
Device Manager shows the Ethernet controller as unknown and I’ve spent most of today trying different drivers and solutions with no luck. I’ve checked and tried similar models and experimented with a few Realtek/Intel drivers but Vista just won’t recognize the network adapter.
At this point I’m slowly giving up so I figured I’d ask the experts here before calling it quits!
Can anyone help me identify the driver?
…I’d really appreciate the help.
The hardware ID is PCI VEN_8086&DEV_1503
Thanks in advance and great to see a forum still keeping Vista alive!

 

[lmacri]

The hardware ID is PCI VEN_8086&DEV_1503

Hi taymouch:

Am I correct that your ESPRIMO E710 has an Intel 82579V Gigabit LAN Ethernet card? I did a product search for "ESPRIMO E710" at Fsas Technologies Support pages USA and the driver download page for the ESPRIMO E710 has drivers for Intel 82579LM/V Gigabite LAN cards for all operating systems from Win XP to Win 10 except Vista, so it appears you've installed an OS that is not supported by Fujitsu for this computer model.



I could only find Win 7 and Win 8.1 compatible drivers when I searched the official Intel site at Search - Intel.com for "82579V Gigabit" (for example, see Support for Intel 82579V Gigabit Ethernet PHY), so if all else fails you could try the 64-bit Vista driver available on the Softpedia site at Download Intel 82579V Network Driver 12.6.45.0 for Windows Vista 64 bit.

 

[Vistaar]

Intel is definitely not keen on Vista support anymore. Another place to search for such things is Microsoft Update Catalog. Using search terms Intel 82579v Vista, the top result appears to be the latest (2013) 64-bit version suitable for Vista according to Microsoft. Package Details tab appears to confirm your Hardware ID.