Just Can't Stay Connected to The Internet

Hey guys, it's my first post here and I'm in quite a quandary. I built this computer up brand new (my specs are listed in my profile) and it worked flawlessly for about a month. I was playing Flight Simulator online, was disconnected, and when I quit the game to investigate I found that I had an exclamation point over the icon in the tray. I had windows repair it and played for several more hours without issue. A month or so later I'm still fighting this issue.

The internet sometimes will work for 11-12 hours and never give me an issue, and other days I literally cannot stay connected for more than 10 seconds or so. I will be surfing the internet, it doesn't matter what I'm doing and a page won't load and sure enough i'll look down at the tray and there will be the infamous yellow ! looking me dead in the eye. I repair it with windows and it fixes it temporarily.

I went out thinking it was a motherboard issue, (I have the ASUS M4A79XTD EVO) and purchased a Netgear PCI LAN card which made absolutely no difference and still plagues me with disconnects. I really just don't know what to do, I've reformatted my computer, I've tried Netgear drivers, I've tried windows drivers, I've tried Realtek drivers, manually installing them, automatically installing them, reseating all of my hardware and connectors, dicking with settings in the card options such as offloads and matrix speeds etc, uninstalled ipv6 as well as other things in that list that i supposedly don't need, I also double clicked on the IPv4 box in the device menu and keyed in my ip address, gateway, and DNS manually and I still received disconnects. I am thus basically left with no real option other than to try and get a replacement motherboard, unless any of you can help that is.

I for the life of me cannot put together any pattern, it will work for several hours and then tank and then just never gets back up on it's feet. Or it will work like crap and then finally get up and is fine again, or it will work great for the majority of the day and then just hit a snag that it never comes back from even after a restart. There's no reason to the manner in which it disconnects it's as random as I've ever seen.

Does anyone know where I can start? I'm on an ethernet connection if it wasn't obvious and running Windows 7 Home Premium.

Thank you to whoever can offer me help, it literally means my computer.

It looks like you have messed with drivers and lan cards to no effect so now you might want to consider that the router your using isn't quite up to Windows 7 standards. I'm not sure what brand of router you are using but often times these sorts of problems can be fixed by just updating the firmware on the router.

Have you tried doing that yet Bowlerguy?

Ya, it's up to date. And as I mentioned this computer worked flawlessly for a month or so before hitting this seemingly incurable snag. I have a Belkin Wireless N router for the record! No serious variables have changed, no hardware has been added or removed that would effect networking, I haven't changed settings on the router either. It's funny, this morning the connection was absolute garbage, I couldn't stay connected for longer than 30 seconds. Since I posted this thread I have yet to experience a dropout. It will happen eventually though, it's inevitable.

Oh it's wireless, that changes things a bit and gives us more options to pursue. You should run this software from Xirrus which will show you the wireless network channels being used in your area.

Run the software and then determine which channels are unused in your area then go into the wireless set up settings of your router and change the channel to one that isn't being used in your area. The software makes it obvious which channels are being used near you.

This is more or less a constant problem with Windows 7 and sometimes you need to check periodically for unused channels because your neighbors can change them to ones that you are using.

Xirrus: The Leader in High Performance Wi-Fi - Advanced IT Wi-Fi Networking Tools

chev65 said:

Oh it's wireless, that changes things a bit and gives us more options to pursue. You should run this software from Xirrus which will show you the wireless network channels being used in your area.

Run the software and then determine which channels are unused in your area then go into the wireless set up settings of your router and change the channel to one that isn't being used in your area. The software makes it obvious which channels are being used near you.

This is more or less a constant problem with Windows 7 and sometimes you need to check periodically for unused channels because your neighbors can change them to ones that you are using.

Xirrus: The Leader in High Performance Wi-Fi - Advanced IT Wi-Fi Networking Tools

Just to be clear, I'm using the Ethernet portion of it. I'm hardwired to the router while others in my house are using the wireless. Do channels still make a difference or is that now non applicable?