I've got an Intel NUC D34010WYKH with a sudden network adapter problem that I'm trying to solve. The small company I work for currently has two of these boxes with identical hardware in them, and one of them has been in use for several months by one of our work at home employees here in town, and it has has had no issues. The second one was deployed a month ago, and developed the problem just this morning. Unfortunately for me, this user is a contract employee on the other side of the country.
The employee normally leaves the machine on overnight, but this morning when she went to unlock it, it had apparently crashed. She held down the power button to get it to start up again, and after going through the Windows 7 failed to shut down properly procedures, she was able to log in again. However, the network adapter will no longer start.
I walked her through various troubleshooting procedures: disabling & re-enabling the adapter, swapping cables & ports on the router, uninstalling & reinstalling updated drivers, updating the BIOS, even a System Restore to around 10 days ago. I spent 90 minutes on the phone with her, but I had no luck in fixing the issue. She's going to dig around in the system logs to see if there's anything that might be useful that she can send me screen captures of. In particular, something that might indicate what caused the original crash, although I fear these may have been lost with the System Restore.
I'm at a loss as to what else I could do, aside from see if there's any diagnostic tools floating around that she could try using to see if that gives us any more details. It seems like either way we're going to be ordering another NUC & parts, have her send her machine back to us and swap them out, and then do additional testing.
Does anybody else have any ideas or experience in dealing with this kind of issue? I've seen flaky adapters in other machines, but that can be dealt with with a NIC card; obviously not a solution here. I also don't consider getting her a wireless card for the NUC as an ideal solution, even if she has a wireless-capable router.