And somewhere in the Windows registry, a backup of the old driver slept—unused, but not deleted. Just in case.

If you use Windows 10 or 11, you have likely experienced the "Realtek Update Loop."

Everyone. You don't really have a choice if your hardware uses Realtek, but thankfully, you don't really need one. It does the job well enough that you rarely have to think about it—which is exactly what you want from a driver.

Because Realtek chips are in everything from budget laptops to high-end gaming motherboards, the driver support is vast. You can almost always find a driver that works, even for older hardware that manufacturers have stopped supporting.

For three years, it had pushed packets, negotiated frequencies, and translated whispers between the motherboard and the router. It was never thanked. Not once.