new Win 11 laptop does not connect through Ethernet>WiFi adapter, but old Win 11 laptop did

Why is my new system not connecting to Ethernet?

So I got this new Lenovo T14s Gen 5 AMD laptop and successfully transferred the 4 TB NVMe stick from my old Lenovo T14s Gen 3 Intel machine. Neither of these systems has a built-in Ethernet port. With my old system I have been using a Cable Matters 2.5 Gbit Ethernet -> USB adapter. It was plug-and-play. On my new machine, this connector the adapter is detected (Windows sound) but I don't get an Ethernet connection, which is much faster than my WiFi 5.0 GHz

Win 11 26100.4946.

Try the above Tutorial

How fast is the WiFi on your router? What WiFi does your laptop support? Doesn't it support Wi-Fi 6 or 6E?

My laptop supports Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax). It has a download speed with WiFi of about 800Mb/s.

here is a link to the driver download page for that hardware.

best of luck, Steve ..

x509 said:

Why is my new system not connecting to Ethernet?

Click to expand...

A couple of things: You noted that the Cable Matters 2.5Gb Ethernet adapter was plug and play on your previous system. However, you need to be aware of this:

First, check to see if it is even showing up in Device Manager. If not, or if the device shows an error, then you definitely need to install the driver.

The Realtek chipset used in this adapter is interesting. When you plug it in the first time, if it does not detect an appropriate driver on the system it will act like a disk drive and you will see a new drive letter in File Explorer. Go to the drive and install the driver. Normally it would try to autorun the driver installer, but depending upon your settings it may not be able to do this. Note that this may be an older, minimalist driver so I would suggest downloading the latest driver from Realtek here:




If this still does not help, could you please provide the following:

1) A screenshot of Device Manager with the network adapters section expanded

2) Go to Settings > Network & internet > Advanced network settings > Hardware and connection properties. On this screen, click on "Copy" at the upper right. Paste the results into your response here.

hsehestedt said:

A couple of things: You noted that the Cable Matters 2.5Gb Ethernet adapter was plug and play on your previous system. However, you need to be aware of this:

First, check to see if it is even showing up in Device Manager. If not, or if the device shows an error, then you definitely need to install the driver.

The Realtek chipset used in this adapter is interesting. When you plug it in the first time, if it does not detect an appropriate driver on the system it will act like a disk drive and you will see a new drive letter in File Explorer.

Click to expand...

Yes I did and I did not understand why I was seeing a new drive letter.

hsehestedt said:

Go to the drive and install the driver. Normally it would try to autorun the driver installer, but depending upon your settings it may not be able to do this. Note that this may be an older, minimalist driver so I would suggest downloading the latest driver from Realtek here:

Click to expand...

I did download the Wiin 11 Auto Installer from RealTek (pain in the ass download system). Again I saw a new drive letter, but this time. So I clicked on the "drive" and it installed the driver. That worked!!! Thank you so much.

Some days, I have a system problem that I can't fix for days. Today was the opposite.