This edition of the Spark! has been hastily thrown
With the Intel Drivers you linked earlier in the post, the wired connection will not show connected for the first hour it is turned on. In the Dock, Wireless has been working fine. Now it works all the time out of the dock with no issues. It would always work before out of the dock, however it frequently required me to disable and re-enable from device manager after initial power on or resume from sleep. When the laptop is not docked, wireless is rock solid now. I have tried and confirmed this with multiple docks of each style. When I put either one of the Usb 3.0 docks on, it correctly reports as 240 watt.
When I used the older usb2.0 dock, it said I was only using a 210 watt adapter. Any suggestions for keeping Windows 8 before I go that route?
I was going to wipe the drive again today and do a clean Windows 7 install before I completely give up. I will have to disable and re-enable the device again from device manager to restore connectivity. It wll start out with speeds around 450mbps and over the first 30 minutes drop down to rates of 5 and 11 mbps. When it does reconnect, the throughput rates will drop down so low that is is practically unusable. I will have to disable and re-enable the wireless nic from device manager to get it to start responding again. Other times, within device manager, it will have an error code 10 and say the device was stopped. When it wakes up from sleeping, it will sometimes connect to an AP, but not be able to ping beyond 127.0.0.1. On the wireless side, it can be just as sporadic. Sometimes after being up on wifi for a couple hours, it will randomly switch over to ethernet, sometimes for a few minutes, sometimes for the rest of the day.
The event logs do not show any errors and just say that the cable was unplugged. I have tried other laptops on my docking station and they work fine. I have tried it with 3 different docking stations and I get the same results. I have gone through and tried every setting within the Advance properties and Bios that I can find and I still have the same issues. I have reloaded the computer from scratch twice.
I have tried every driver I could find for this. The message just says "Network cable unplugged". If it is undocked, the Ethernet works great, however when I dock it, the connectivity is very sporadic and is out more than it is on. Everything works great on it except network connectivity. I have a Dell M6800, only about 4 months old, but out of warranty. I figured I would ask one more time before I give up on Windows 8.1 and possibly the entire laptop.