Railworks America

I recently found out that my Qualcomm Atheros AR8171/8175 PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet Controller (NDIS 6.30) was the source of having system interrupts. My question is can I do without it?

Are you hard wired to a modem? If so, the answer is, you need some kind of Ethernet Controller.
It might need a driver reinstall.
It might need a newer driver.

If it's hardware related, TP-Link makes really good Gigabit controller for about $15. It plugs into a PCIe slot.

It could be it's driver settings.

No, using wireless I don' think I will have to use it. Here's the thing though, if I make the laptop go to sleep and turn it back on. The problem disappears entirely.

bpetit wrote:No, using wireless I don' think I will have to use it. Here's the thing though, if I make the laptop go to sleep and turn it back on. The problem disappears entirely.

Weird... If you're using wireless then you don't need the Ethernet Port. If I were you, I'd go into the networking settings and disable that LAN chip.
I think though from what you are saying, it has some kind of initialization problem and a new driver might fix it.
Sometimes a new bit of software, or a Windows update will break something like a driver for a networking device.
I used to have a problem with a onboard LAN chip on a Dell XPS 8300. I read up on it in the Dell forums and installed a PCIe LAN card from TP-Link.
That stopped the problem, but since you are on a laptop, that limits your choices.