Wired adapter issue

Hi all,

I have asked this issue before but as I was totally barking up the wrong tree thought it best to start again fresh. Basically I am seeing a strange boot delay of about 10-15 seconds when using ethernet on my laptop 24 hours after previous shutdown. So I will boot up, reach the login screen, tap in password and then the 'welcome to windows' message remains onscreen for about 10 - 15 secs before continuing to the desktop. If I use wifi instead, then I see no delay, straight into desktop. It only happens with the ethernet adapter. The other thing that makes this delay weird is if completely shutdown the laptop and boot up again before 24 hours have elapsed then I will see no delay. It just happens if I don't reboot within a day of last use. Once it is up and running I have zero problems. But this delay is irritating.

I have unmapped all drives, switched ethernet cables (3 times), changed the static IP and also set to obtain automatically, updated the atheros driver all without success. I cannot understand what windows is doing/waiting for in these 10 - 15 secs. I look at the boot time in the event viewer and I see no 101 events. Just a 100 event showing the times which all look ok apart from being 10-15 secs longer when this happens.

I thought the router could be the issue but have eliminated that because it works fine with other devices and plus it must be doing things correctly anyway as the wifi my laptop takes comes from an access point rather than the main router - so the ethernet that feeds the access point's wifi signal is working great and has no delay. So Windows 7 must be the culprit.

Any ideas?

Cheers,
Wayne

I still want to get to the root of the problem but since ethernet is the issue. Is there a way of delaying the wired NIC at windows startup? Obviously there is some kind of event happening every 24 hours causing the delay. If the NIC does not enable itself til slightly later in the boot I could get prob get round this. I would then turn the wifi on so that is present immediately upon boot so I initially have network access. If that makes sense?

I know I can just keep the ethernet unplugged and plug it back in shortly after windows desktop displays but would like to have sonething more automated. Maybe a batch script I could put in the startup section if the start menu?

Cheers
Wayne

Hi,

Thanks for the response. Yes it is gigabit, I'll give that a try, mine from memory is on auto negotiation. I don't want to jeopardise my gigabit NAS transfer speeds so should I be selecting the top one or the one highlighted in the screenshot? Unfortunately I then have to wait 24 hours before booting again to see if that worked.

Cheers
Wayne

One thing... do you have to wait 24 hours between boots, or can you boot it while disconnected from the network as often as you like, then after 24 hours, reconnect to the network, boot, and still see the problem? (Does the question make sense?)

Why doesn't Windows have a "verbose" boot like most versions of Linux do/did? Things like that might tell you where the hangup is.

I have to wait 24 hours to be able to re produce the problem.

I'm not sure that you understood my question. What I meant was, if you disconnected your ethernet cable, then rebooted 17 times over the next 24 hours, then reconnected the ethernet cable at hour 25 and rebooted, would the problem re-occur? Would the pause happen again?

What I'm trying to find out is if the router is only giving you an IP lease for 24 hours, so now the computer has to negotiate a new IP address.

If you can access the admin page of your router, can you delete your machine from the DHCP client list, just to see if that causes the delay on the next boot? Again, this would determine if the pause is caused by the machine re-obtaining an IP address.

Sorry I do understand what you mean now. I will test it out and report back. I have played around with this so much. I may well of tried something similar whereby having rebooted several times inbetween with wifi only and/or no adapter being connected I tried then reconnecting ethernet in the '25th' hour and there was no pause. So it seems that when ethernet is last connected & remains connected for the next boot the delay shows itself after 24 hours. Doing stuff/boots inbetween or before 24 hours has elapsed does some kind of reset preventing this problem showing.

I will test this and check for certain though.

Thanks,
Wayne