Network connectivity

Sometimes when I open my laptop back up (power has been ON the whole time), I'll have an "X" through the network connection in the tray on my taskbar. In previous versions of Windows, all I had to do was right-click, fix signal and the computer would always find the connection. However, in Windows 7, when I go to the Network & Sharing Center and click the red "X" at the top of the window, Windows is able to detect the problem exactly 0% of the time. It's incredibly frustrating. The only solution is to close the laptop again and then re-open it, and I sometimes have to do this multiple times until the internet signal is detected. There's gotta be a better way to do it. Not a fan of the user-friendliness of Windows 7 compared to past versions. Not a fan at all. Any help would be much appreciated.

In that case you should turn off all the sleep or hibrenate functions of the driver, both in power options and also in device manager.