Laptop keeps dropping wired connection in favour of wireless.

I "dock" my laptop by using it like a desktop PC - it's connected to an external monitor, keyboard and mouse, and is connected to the router by a good old-fashioned network cable so that I get the best possible speed out of my internet connection.

I sometimes un-dock it to use it elsewhere in the house, or to take it with me to give presentations to clients, etc.

I therefore need both the wireless adapter and the wired LAN adapter enabled and ready to connect. I have placed the wired LAN adapter above the wireless adapter in the list, so that it tries to connect via the wire first, then wirelessly if it can't find a wire (i.e. when I've un-docked it).

"That seems simple enough!" I hear you say. And, yes, you would have thought so ...

... BUT ...

It ain't that simple, folks!

The laptop seems absolutely obsessed with establishing a wireless connection, even when a wired connection has been established. It willfully drops the wired connection perhaps 4 or 5 times per day, and establishes a wireless connection instead. I then have to manually disconnect the wireless connection and it then reverts to the wired connection. The wireless connection is crap because the laptop is in my home office in the garden, which is about 40m away from the router.

I imagined this could have been due to a fault in the wired connection, because I made it myself with a 50m (approx) run of Cat6 armoured and shielded external network cable, run through an access conduit, and tucked safely out of harm's way.

Nevertheless, I am also running a linux machine (Debian 6) on the same wired connection and it never complains about loss of connection. In addition, I set a network monitor daemon running on Debian to ping the router over a weekend, and it recorded almost zero packet loss and certainly no loss of connection at any point (which is what you would expect from almost brand-new, undamaged cat 6 cable over a 50m run). I know that the distance is not an issue because I know that, as a rule of thumb, you can reliably go up to 100m on a network cable without requiring a repeater.

So, why is Windows 7 so obsessed with dropping the (fast, good) wired connection and connecting to the (slow, crap) wireless connection? Surely it should do some kind of ping-test to see which is the best connection before deciding to do whatever it wants with my connection to the router?!!

XmisterIS said:

I "dock" my laptop by using it like a desktop PC - it's connected to an external monitor, keyboard and mouse, and is connected to the router by a good old-fashioned network cable so that I get the best possible speed out of my internet connection.

I sometimes un-dock it to use it elsewhere in the house, or to take it with me to give presentations to clients, etc.

I therefore need both the wireless adapter and the wired LAN adapter enabled and ready to connect. I have placed the wired LAN adapter above the wireless adapter in the list, so that it tries to connect via the wire first, then wirelessly if it can't find a wire (i.e. when I've un-docked it).

"That seems simple enough!" I hear you say. And, yes, you would have thought so ...

... BUT ...

It ain't that simple, folks!

The laptop seems absolutely obsessed with establishing a wireless connection, even when a wired connection has been established. It willfully drops the wired connection perhaps 4 or 5 times per day, and establishes a wireless connection instead. I then have to manually disconnect the wireless connection and it then reverts to the wired connection. The wireless connection is crap because the laptop is in my home office in the garden, which is about 40m away from the router.

I imagined this could have been due to a fault in the wired connection, because I made it myself with a 50m (approx) run of Cat6 armoured and shielded external network cable, run through an access conduit, and tucked safely out of harm's way.

Nevertheless, I am also running a linux machine (Debian 6) on the same wired connection and it never complains about loss of connection. In addition, I set a network monitor daemon running on Debian to ping the router over a weekend, and it recorded almost zero packet loss and certainly no loss of connection at any point (which is what you would expect from almost brand-new, undamaged cat 6 cable over a 50m run). I know that the distance is not an issue because I know that, as a rule of thumb, you can reliably go up to 100m on a network cable without requiring a repeater.

So, why is Windows 7 so obsessed with dropping the (fast, good) wired connection and connecting to the (slow, crap) wireless connection? Surely it should do some kind of ping-test to see which is the best connection before deciding to do whatever it wants with my connection to the router?!!

It is a bit strange that Windows would be choosing a wireless connection over a wired one.

Have you tried changing the metric of the wired connection to a lower number?

Windows looks at this number in order to determine which connection to use. The following link explains how it works and shows directions on how to change the metric for a preferred network connection.

Blog Rat: How to change the Gateway Metric on Windows 7