I have an old Pipo mini-pc I play with from time to time. It is running the free version of Win 8.1 that came with these kinds of machines. Within its limits, it has always worked fine.

Today I was running some checks on it and suddenly, for no reason I can discern, the LAN connection stopped working after a reboot. Up to that point there had never been any kind of issue. Now Windows can't see it for some reason. I cannot think of anything that changed or would have affected it. It worked until it didn't.

I have tried everything I can think of, including changing the cable. I can see from the LEDs that the port sees it when it is plugged in, but Windows insists it is not there. 

I took a look with Device Manager and there are a whole lot of WAN Miniport devices, as well as a couple of Bluetooth ones and a Realtek Wireless LAN device, but nothing for wired. I have looked on-line for Realtek LAN drivers, but there are a lot of them and I don't know how to pick out the one I might need. Windows says there is no device present, so I can't update it. 

Naturally the LAN port could have just suddenly failed, but that kind of thing stretches my credulity, especially when Windows is notorious for these kinds of faults. I am wondering if anyone might have ideas about this.

Wi-fi works fine but I would really like to get the Ethernet working again.