Our tale starts with Windows Multipoint Server 2012 and it's inability to cope with USB3, after being turned away from many a Microsoft door we had enough and gave up on MPS 2012 again. Our lovely new hardware would just have to suffer with MPS 2011.

MPS 2011 is not easy either with it faining no knowledge of many devices when confronted with their drivers, these however were usually just a case of pointing device manager in the right direction.

Now onto the topic, the Intel® Ethernet Connection I218-LM a device that will work happily under Windows 7 or 8 but thanks to intel's drivers would not even show up as an option on a Multipoint server. I know, it's not exactly in the HAL but why not just remove the driver restrictions and let people use it if they want to?

So, after an hour of messing that's what I did:

• Download the latest drivers for the Intel® Ethernet Connection I218-LM for Windows 7 and extract them.
  
• Find the \Intel\PRO1000\Winx64\NDIS62 folder
  
• Edit the e1d62x64.inf file in notepad
  
• Remove this:

  ,\ 
     PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_153B

  
  

• from the ControlFlags section to just leave this:

  [ControlFlags]
  ExcludeFromSelect = \ 
     PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_153A

  
  

• Now find your adapter in device manager, update the driver and tell it to brows computer, then select a driver from a list
  
• Select network adapter then have disk...
  
• navigate to your \Intel\PRO1000\Winx64\NDIS62 and hit ok
  
• Scroll down to the bottom and you should now see I218-LM at the bottom of the list, it will complain about being possibly the wrong driver and unsigned but it should work.
  

In conclusion, I truly dislike intel's driver department, they seem to take great pains to cause as much rubbish as possible with their drivers.