Plug in your Surface Ethernet Adapter, wait for the installation to fail.I did some digging and found that the Surface Ethernet adapter uses the Realtek chipset and I noticed that in the Devices section under network adapters Windows RT now has a Realtek USB FE Family Controller driver. (Update: Microsoft has removed Surface RT and Surface 2 from the page, don’t despair, it DOES work, read on) However, if you were to update your device, purchase the Surface Ethernet adapter, plug it in, you will get the infamous message “Not Compatible with this version of Windows.” Even running Windows Update does not fix this issue, at least not at the moment. According to the support website you will see that the Surface Ethernet adapter works with RT 8.1 (* so do most 3rd party adapters). Microsoft has finally given us USB Ethernet support for RT with 8.1.
