Ethernet card "Disabled"

A strange occurance today and I wonder if anyone can shed any light on it. is it a virus or malware problem or just an odd anomaly?
Having been surfing the web, suddenly I could not get into google or any other websites, the modem checked out OK so I started unplugging and re plugging my Ethernet card and noticed that the lud wasn't glowing, went into Device manager and the device was shown as "Disabled" I re-enabled it and no further problems. Likely to happen again?

 

G'Day bg9208,

Could have been just a "Hickey" as "Steve R Jones" explained.

However, I have, in my experience, come across a bug in the Power Management for the Network card that can intermittently also cause this.

This is located in the - System Properties -> Hardware -> Device Manager -> then click the + symbol in the box in front of "Network adapters" -> then right mouse click on the Ethernet card -> and click on 'Properties, and in this properties window you will see the "Power Management" tab at the top -> click on it to make it active, and un-tick the check box for the option "Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power "

This setting was intended for Laptop Computers, but as things go Microsoft may have forgotten that on Desktop PC's this is not needed.

On PC's which had the same issue as you have experienced, after performing the action described above, the disconnection no longer occurred.

Other problems with the wrong drivers installed, particularly with 3rd party NIC cards using Realtek chips, will also cause this problem.

A virus scan is not wasted either!

pcbugfixer

 

Thanks for all your inputs, I suspected that it might be a transient like the odd cosmic particle passing through the CPU so I have checked that power management was disabled and I'll know what to do if it happens again.