Frequently Asked Questions about Intel® Ethernet Drivers

You can use the Intel® Driver & Support Assistant to figure out if your drivers are up-to-date. The utility works well for retail products, but some of the devices with Intel in the name are components supported by computer system manufacturers. If you have one of the devices supported by the computer system manufacturer, the utility might not identify the device as an Intel device. For these adapters, download the manufacturer software that was validated with your system.

You can manually find your drivers and software in Download Center if Intel® Driver & Support Assistant does not work for you.

The version number on the files you download are a release number that represents a collection of drivers and software for Intel® Ethernet adapters. The release version number does not exactly match any of the version numbers for the individual files. The release version number is a convenient way to reference the latest collection of drivers and software.

The reason there are so many software releases is because Intel is constantly adding support for new products. Most of the time, there is no reason to install a new software release for Intel Ethernet adapters because there were no changes made that would have a significant effect on your experience. The biggest exception is when you buy a new Intel Ethernet adapter. When you install a new adapter, you cannot use software versions that are older than the adapter.

The software collections have drivers and software for many adapter families. Each family of adapters require their own unique drivers. Different NDIS* driver versions require different versions of Windows. When you download and run the file, Windows* uses information files to assign the correct drivers and software, and installs them automatically. If the driver version for your Intel Ethernet adapter does not change, then you are using the latest driver for your adapter.

If you have Intel® PROSet installed, look on the Link Speed tab of your network adapter properties for the version number. The version number of Intel PROSet closely matches the version release number of the collection. Sometimes Intel PROSet has a longer number, but the first digits match. For example, Intel PROSet, version 14.5 .1.0, was part of the version 14.5 release.