I have no experience of SMARTY but I just counted the public IP change over 20 times in less than 1 minute on both your Android and desktop screen shots, surely this isn't right, you really need to try the sim in a different device like a mobile phone to see what happens.

Edited by deleted (Sat 14-Aug-21 22:59:43)

Nay that doesn't seem to change anything unfortunately 😕

I did notice that after changing settings the NIC stopped working and refused to be re-enabled ('code 10'), and logged a few meaningless errors visible in the Event Viewer - but it's back working after a restart. Seems like there might be a driver issue, I'll have to see if I can find another that's compatible but I've had no luck so far.

What NIC is it?

Just tried with my phone's SIM (Three) and it's also experiencing IP changes every second or two, so it's not just a SMARTY issue. I'll go out and try a different mast tomorrow, but I have a feeling that's just how it's designed to work with Three's network. I'll also put a support request in and see what they say about it.

Ah sorry, should've said; Killer E2400 Ethernet. Seems Intel recently bought over the company and no longer offers drivers and support for the device as it's around 7 years old now. Tried installing a driver I downloaded 2 years back and Windows seems to ignore it - the install process goes through (or sometimes freezes indefinitely), but the driver version remains the same - perhaps it's the same version as I have now. EDIT: Yeah it's the same version as Microsoft provide, just looked in the INF file. Not sure if any later versions exist.

Right now its showing as version 9.0.0.42 provided automatically through Windows, dated 2016.

Edited by thebigdolphin1 (Sat 14-Aug-21 23:28:34)

Did you say the same machine & NIC running linux was fine?

The other thing to do would be to try another NIC with windows.

Yeah, same PC works fine running Linux from a bootable USB, so it's not a hardware issue.

Ha, you read my mind mate; just realised I had an old PCI WiFi NIC lying around (it's not anything great, one of those cheapo things off Aliexpress) and gave it a try with the Ethernet disabled. Seems the NIC isn't at fault then - timeouts and connection reset errors are also occurring through that card.

I'm wondering if some VPN or packet monitoring software is interfering with it — I thought I disabled them all when trying to fix this the other week, but maybe not. I'll try uninstalling Wireshark and my VPN apps to see if that restores any stability.

Edited by thebigdolphin1 (Sat 14-Aug-21 23:50:13)

In reply to a post by thebigdolphin1:

I'm wondering if some VPN or packet monitoring software is interfering with it

Extremely likely culprits, especially if they are not fully uninstalled (rather than just switched off). Some VPN software embeds itself quite deeply into the windows networking stack and can screw things up.

Frustrating, uninstalled about 8 different network-related apps and still no luck with that.

Next step I'm gonna start killing programs one by one to see if anything improves, then I might make a fresh install of Windows on a second drive to see if that suffers the same problems (I assume it wont).

Same hardware running linux doesn't have an issue -> therefore the issue must be with Windows/NIC driver and/or other software under windows.

Clean W10 install to second drive and boot from there, sounds like a good plan to conclusively prove it.