If installed, Intel’s PROSet software provides a custom device manager property page for the adaptor which has some pretty nice features, including diagnostics. The first two are selected for you by default. Note that in addition to the installing the base driver for the ethernet controller, the package will also give you the option to install Intel PROSet for Windows Device Manager, Intel Advanced Networking Services, and SNMP for Intel network adapters for Windows 7.
Sure enough, after trying several versions of Lenovo-supported drivers, the ultimate solution to this problem was to dump the Lenovo driver completely and download the driver for the 82577LM ethernet controller directly from Intel. So… I suspected the culprit might be my Windows 7 network driver. I dual-boot with this machine and I did not seem to be experiencing the same problem while running Ubuntu. But shortly after purchasing it I began to notice that its ethernet adaptor would lose connection on a regular-yet-random basis regardless of the network I happened to be on. Earlier this year I purchased a Lenovo ThinkPad T410 laptop.
