I agree regarding the ridicule.
To add onto your experience, we are a medium sized organization with 500 users. None of our other desktops or laptops have experienced this issue. This issue started with the newest shipment of laptops we received a few months ago. We have been using HP laptops in the past without any issue until this new shipment that uses this model of on board network adapter. This issue is random and some laptops haven't failed yet while other laptops may go 2 weeks without a failure.
Considering this does not happen with any of the other model HP laptops, desktops or Lenovo laptops... we have come to the conclusion it must be the network adapter itself. the other model desktops and laptops we currently use that have no issue, do not use this model of onboard network adapter.
The network adapter model is the only difference we have found between the systems that work and the new laptops that exhibit this issue. Our model of NIC is a I219-LM indicating only a slight difference in implementation because they are integrated into mobile platforms which users lower power rather than a desktop.
This is causing us a huge upset in the department because we ordered and received a bulk order of laptops that have this model network adapter and we cannot use them. The few users we deployed these new laptops using this network adapter to are experiencing this problem. We stopped issuing them until we can figure it out and we currently have about 10 users who can only use our wireless network because of this issue.
We are beyond frustrated and Intel seems to be unresponsive. We will likely be contacting our HP representative and ask about returning over a few hundred laptops for a model that does not have this particular onboard network adapter in it.