Internet Randomly Dropping Out

[Justas]

Hey all. For the last couple of nights my internet has been randomly dropping out. When it does I cannot ping, log into my router, or renew my IP. The first way I got around this was to restart my computer(which sometimes worked). Then I found out if I disable the port and enable it again it will work most of the time. While it is down on my computer I can access the internet on other devices like my PS3 or my laptop. I do not think it is the router, but just in case it is a D-Link DIR-625, because it has worked well for the passed 8 months. I am currently using the on board NIC of my P5N32 SLI SE Deluxe motherboard. And since I have had this motherboard it has had a quark with it. It has occasionally failed to initialize the NIC and requires a restart to initialize. (This is rare, but an obvious fault of the board) I have tried to update the drivers but they are all from 2006 and I have those versions.

Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

[Tripredacus]

When I encounter this type of behaviour, I end up doing the following:

1. Change the DHCP range on the router to be less than the full scope. For example, if your scope is 192.168.1.1 - 192.168.1.255, Then change the scope to 192.168.1.10 - 192.168.1.255.

2. Grab the following info from an ipconfig -all when the internet is working:

- subnet mask

- dns server

- gateway

3. run the following commands: "ipconfig -release" then "arp -d". Disregard any information that is returned after pressing enter.

4. Pick one of the IPs in the range you've excluded, such as 192.168.1.5 and set that as a static on your NIC. Use the subnet, gateway and DNS addresses you collected from the ipconfig.

5. Reboot the PC

See if this makes any difference for you. Sometimes, Windows ends up having problems when the IP lease from a router expires, and what happens is that Windows either doesn't make a discover to renew its IP, or does not send the ACK back to the router. I'm not entirely sure why this happens, but have seen it on numerous router brands and firmware versions. I've actually seen this happen on Mac OS 9 as well.

Again, this isn't to say that this is the real problem. You should check event viewer for any network related messages (you may only see warnings or infos and not errors) and also check the logs in your router as well.