Z77 Extreme 4 - network driver won't install

New user here.

I just upgraded to comcast and I have 3 computers all running Win7 64bit.
2 of them have download speeds in excess of 60 Mbps and these are the older systems. (1 & 2)

1. Intel Quad core 9750 on a BIOSTAR mb
2. Intel 990x 6 core on a Gigabit G1 Sniper
3. Intel I7-3770k on the Asrock Z77 Extreme 4

The Z77 Ext4 has a hard time hitting 20 Mbps so I thought maybe the XFast Lan was throttling my speed and killed the cfosspeed process.   Nope, still right at 20Mpbs.

Next I checked to see if there was an updated driver.   I downloaded the  Broadcom Lan driver ver:14.8.4.1 zip file from ASROCK and the first time I ran it, it un-installed the network driver so I immediately lost connectivity.  This is usually a normal thing as a lot of packages will uninstall the older drivers before installing the new ones.

When I reran the install again, it started to do the install and at the very end it failed.  "The wizard was interrupted before Broadcom NetLink Controller could be completely installed....Your system has not been modified, run setup again"   Click Finish

Ran the install again and the same failure.  If I only had the one computer, I would have been freaking out at this point.  Fortunately I have 2 other systems, so I went searching to find a Broadcom BCM57781 driver (info from MB manual) directly from broadcom.

I found a compatible driver (Broadcom Netlink (TM) Gigabit Ethernet) Broadcom version 17.2.0.0 and copied it to a flash drive and installed the driver and now I have access again.    Even with this driver the most I can get is still right at 20 Mbps. 

I noticed that the LAN port had an orange light, but when I checked the manual, Orange means it's a 100 Mbps connection.   So something realizes that the connection is capable of 100 Mpbs, it's just not doing it.

So now a few questions:
1.  Is the Broadcom driver I now have newer or better than the one I tried to install.  ASRock driver 14.8.4.1 ???
2.  Why is the wizard failing.
3.  Why am I only getting 20 Mbps???

Please let me know if there is a setting somewhere I can change to get the speed up to what the other two systems are running.  

Thank you





Edited by Collector-X - 29 Oct 2015 at 5:10pm

So I've been working for the last several hours on this and to answer your questions.

1 = I did switch out cables and swapped them around.  No change. 
2 = The quad core machine is directly connected to the cable modem and get's 60+ Mbps and is not shared.   - The 990x and the Extreme4 system are on the same, but separate subnet from the quad core, and connected through the same router with file sharing.  

I moved the LAN cables of both machines through all 4 ports of the 2nd router and still no change.  The 990x has a 60Mbps+ connection - the Extreme 4 still only getting about 20.

3 = Next I did a direct file transfer using a 1.3 GB file and the fastest it got was 7.4 MB/s 

Since you brought up the router, it's make and model is an Airlink 101 SuperG wireless router. Model # AR430W - The antenna for the wireless has been removed to avoid any issues with the wireless connection from the comcast modem to our phones.   The only other change that was made to the router is I switched it to DHCP and changed the DNS entries to comcast's DNS servers. 

None of the 3 computers have wireless capability.  All are hardwired.  
----
With all that being said, it still doesn't explain why the installation of the new drivers from ASROCK failed to install with the "Wizard was interrupted" failure.

I did take a look through the forums and a general internet search and this appears to be a fairly common problem though not exclusive to the LAN driver.  The graphics driver seemed to be the most common with this problem but still no solution on how to fix it.

Thank you.

------------
UPDATE
------------
Was reading another post where another user was having a slow connection and his speed went back up after uninstalling XFAST-LAN, so thought hey, what can it hurt.

Removed XFAST-LAN and now getting the same speed as the other computers, so it was XFAST-LAN that was throttling the speed.   I thought that program was mainly just a network monitor, but it was actually slowing everything down.

So basically my speed problem is fixed, however I would still be interested in knowing what is causing the installation Wizard to fail on updating the drivers even after XFAST-LAN was removed.

Thank you.





 


Edited by Collector-X - 30 Oct 2015 at 4:28pm

Parsec nailed it, XFastLAN prioritizes gaming workloads so that explains the problems you were having.