What is going on with my network?

Grimm

A couple weeks ago i bought a new asus laptop (vista) and it connected just fine to my linksys router. But now for the past week or so i keep losing my internet connection. It says its still connected to my router but unable to connect to the internet. Warcraft will just disconnect me and when i try firefox, i get the message "connection interrupted. The connection to the server was reset while the page was loading. The network link was interrupted while negotiating a connection. Please try again." At first i just had to disconnect and reconnect to my network, then i had to restart the computer, then it was a couple times i had to restart, now nothing seems to make it want to work. It often seems to happen when my computer wakes up from sleep mode, but now thats not even a constant. Also the computer works fine on my mothers home network and two of my friends networks. My three year old gateway laptop (xp media center) and my old dell desktop (xp pro) have no problems at all. So basicly with nothing acting constant, i having a bit of trouble tracking down the problem here. So if anyone can point me in the right direction before i end up tearing out all of my hair, i would be very thankful.

mspencer

This isn't conclusive advice, and I'm hoping someone will see this who has had direct experience with this sort of problem, but . . . it sounds like a driver bug. You may need to look for updated network adapter drivers, or if the laptop is very new, wait for updated drivers to become available.

One possibility, if the network card just dies and won't come back to life without a reboot, is some sort of resource conflict. I know it's the 21st century but computers still have interrupt request lines, and interrupts still trigger interrupt handlers which cause the OS to dispatch messages to kernel drivers. IRQ conflicts can still exist, and poorly written drivers can lose their ability to receive new messages from their hardware if they handle IRQ conflict situations poorly. So, if that specific thing happens to be the problem, a new driver can help.

eternalbl

Update the drivers on the laptop and check for firmware updates for your router. You'll need to save your settings for the router before you do this, and you'll probably want to write them down too just in case. And always update with a computer that has a wired connection.

Just a start really, but especially if you haven't gone crazy changing the wireless settings on the laptop that should do it.