Wireless network disappears from a single computer.

[AceGambit]

I have a variety of wireless internet enabled devices in my house running Windows 7, Ubuntu, iPod Touch, and Android. All of them function perfectly fine connecting to my Verizon Fios all-in-one modem/router, except one. One of my Windows 7 desktop PC's can usually connect just fine, but occasionally, it decides that there is no wireless network to connect to. Randomly, the list of available networks, just blanks out, and I get the icon of the signal bars with a red X through them. When I AM connected, the connection is full, strong, and reliable.

There seems to be no rhyme or reason to when it goes away, except that it almost always seems to happen while I'm using it. I very rarely sit down to my computer to find it disconnected. Sometimes it will be off for a minute, sometimes an hour.

I have tried everything from DNS flushes to registry hacks and card drivers. I am pretty sure I have the most updated drivers for my card, and I have swapped wireless cards with other computers and the other ones work fine with this card, and it's still this PC that doesnt do so well.

I'm running out of ideas, any help would be tremendously appreciated. I do run bittorrent on the computer sometimes, but the outages do not always coincide with large downloads, or any downloads, but I have not ruled that out as a possibility. Any insight would be fantastic.

Thanks,

Kurt

 

[AllOnTheBus]

Windows Firewall will set up different rules for the type of network
you choose. By this I mean that if you set the Windows Firewall for
a Public connection the security of that machine will tighten.

Have you tried the Home Network setting if the machine is
not already set to that? If it isn't, give that a go and see
if the connection is maintained.

You can change this by clicking on the network icon in
the taskbar (bottom right of screen) and then clicking
on Network and Sharing center. In this
screen where your connection is indicated you should see
if it is a Home, Work or Private connection.
Try Home network connection and see if this makes any difference.

I will assume that if you are fiddling the registry you are
an advanced PC user and have already tried the above mentioned,
however I believe in trying the simple stuff first and in this case
it could be a simple firewall rule kicking in after a period of time.

Edit: Forgot to mention- have you looked at the Win 7 machine which
can connect to your wireless router and applied the same network
settings to the machine which can't connect? Make sure all Network
settings are matched on both the Win 7 machines.

 

[AceGambit]

I have done everything I can possibly find to ensure the settings are the same. An important note might be that ideally I would like the machine in question to maintain a static IP, so I'm setting that manually, but letting the router assign one through DHCP produces the same error, so I've mostly ruled that out as an issue.

The only difference between the working win7 machine and the non-working one is 32-Bit vs 64-Bit. The 64 bit one is the broken one. (For consistency sake, I took a Wireless USB device and plugged it into both machines, that way I knew the NIC was the same.)

 

[AllOnTheBus]

I'm just gonna try throwing out some suggestions here
so bare with me.

Have you tried releasing the IP address and renewing on
the machine in question? (Let me know if you don't know this command)

If your router is using DHCP to allocate
IP addresses on your network, let it do this after the
release and renew command to see if that works.

If you are setting the IP address manually as you say,
I assume you are also making sure that the address is
within the DHCP scope?

Hope I'm helping here somewhat.

Edit: Also - have you checked your wireless network adapter
on the machine in question?

 

[AceGambit]

All useful suggestions. Unfortunately also all way past my point in troubleshooting though. I'd made it down to flipping the broadcast flag but I don't think that makes much of a difference if I'm manually assigning the IP. The funny thing is that it sometimes just works. Othertimes it just doesn't. Without me doing anything. Is it possible that network traffic (such as bittorrent or other high volume applications) could be causing this problem? If so. Is there something I can use to determine this. I've tried sifting through wireshark packets and windows error logs - but to no avail.



Edit: The network adapter doesn't seem to make a difference, I've tried 2 different ones. A USB, and a pci. Both cheap cards, but both work fine in other machines. If it matters, the USB is an RNX-G1LX, and the PCI card is a Realtek RTL8190.

 

[AllOnTheBus]

Yeh for sure- network traffic could be a problem.

P2P file downloading and video streaming will all
cause these sorts of problem.

Does your router have QoS and shaping capabilities?
Wireshark probably gives you the stats anyway right?
I am not a user of Wireshark so I'm unsure although I
have heard it is a good program- number one tool
for the dark side so I believe!

If your router doesn't have QoS and shaping then maybe
you could find some third party software to do the
job of distributing your bandwidth. When you use
Wireshark I'm guessing that it would indicate
packet loss and the like, and before it sounded like you
could see no errors when using this software so therefore,
would shaping make a difference? = Hmmmmm

Edit: Just found some freeware here which may be useful??
http://www.netlimiter.com/

This one will also work on Win 7 according to
another forum I just cam across:
Traffic Shaper XP -Bandwidth Limiter

 

[AceGambit]

Alright, this gives me something to research. Another place to dig into. Thanks so much for your help. I'll play with these.

 

[AllOnTheBus]

Hope I have been of some assistance.

Please post back any results for interested parties
and future users of this forum- thanks

Cheers