I had one of those in Dual core Athlon64 box running pfsense no problem so I don't think it is pfsense that is the problem here. Might just be something finicky hardware wise.
I can't blame them. The market with these kids growing up is changing a lot. I see a lot of kids not at all interested in driving or even learning to drive. Half of them even seem to ave anxiety issues when it comes to the concept.
Then there are the kids that will drive but have no desire for...
ESXi supported realtek nics i think back in like ver 4.1. Sometime after that they dropped support for them. You can still get them to work but it will take a bit of effort to inject the driver into your preferred install method. An easier method might be to just install 4.1 then upgrade to 6.5...
I haven't seen a win7 box in the wild in a long time it seems. Most people/businesses I do work for upgraded their machine itself eventually which came win either win8 or 10.
o.O people share internet like this still?
I think you should do one of the DIY routers like pfsense and have it share the internet to your LAN as well as do you vpn connection.