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I have two laptops in the house. Come home at the end of the day, and laptop 1 works fine and connects right to the internet through wifi.
Go over to the second laptop, try to log on to the internet, and no connection. Always have to unplug router, plug it back in. Then the laptop will log right on through the wifi.
Can anyone give any suggestions as to why it's doing this? And what I might be able to do prevent this.
Is this new behavior for what had been a stable situation or did it start when something was changed, added, or removed?
Is it always the same laptop that won't connect or is the first laptop you happen to use that day?
Are one or more of the laptops powered down or removed from the premises during any part of the day?
What operating systems are installed on the two laptops?
What is the make and model of the router?
How do you get your Internet (what is the router connected to)?
Are there any other computing devices using the router?
After you plug the router back in, do both laptops work or just the one you are trying to use?
Unpowering and repowering the router causes it to reboot, which indicates but does not prove that the router is the culprit. It may be misconfigured. Is there anyone in your house that may have played with the router settings?
Last edited by FrogCross; 09-30-2015 at 04:46 AM..
Is this new behavior for what had been a stable situation or did it start when something was changed, added, or removed? New behavior, nothing has changed.
Is it always the same laptop that won't connect or is the first laptop you happen to use that day? Always the same laptop.
Are one or more of the laptops powered down or removed from the premises during any part of the day? None are powered down
What operating systems are installed on the two laptops? Windows 7 on the problem laptop, Windows 8 on the stable laptop
What is the make and model of the router? Linksys, wrt54g v5
How do you get your Internet (what is the router connected to)? Cox cable modem
Are there any other computing devices using the router? Tablet, and cell phone automatically connects, once I get home
After you plug the router back in, do both laptops work or just the one you are trying to use? Both laptops work.
Unpowering and repowering the router causes it to reboot, which indicates but does not prove that the router is the culprit. It may be misconfigured. Is there anyone in your house that may have played with the router settings? Nobody has changed anything with the router settings.
Hope this helps. Let me know if you need more info. Thanks.
I have two laptops in the house. Come home at the end of the day, and laptop 1 works fine and connects right to the internet through wifi.
Go over to the second laptop, try to log on to the internet, and no connection. Always have to unplug router, plug it back in. Then the laptop will log right on through the wifi.
Can anyone give any suggestions as to why it's doing this? And what I might be able to do prevent this.
I had a very similar problem last year.
A rebuilt dell laptop with win 7 ultimate, that had been running fine for about a year. no wifi problems.
Over time, though, it started dropping the wifi connection. Mostly when it went into sleep or hibernate mode when not being used all day. All I had to do was reconnect wifi or even restart. Never had to restart/reboot the wifi router.
But that got old pretty fast. I wanted to find the solution. Meaning, once you physically open the laptop it it "woke up", it should connect to the home wifi.
No other wifi device had problems connecting to our wifi router: macbooks, win 8.1 laptop, various tablets and cell phones. Only this win7 laptop. So unlikely to be the wifi router.
I updated the win 7 laptop with all latest updates. Special attention to the wifi driver. I think I did that update manually. Specific to the onboard Intel wifi component.
Try the device driver updates that FastNinja500 mentioned.
A) If you already have the latest drivers installed then a quick re-install following these steps:
- Open Device Manager (START > RUN > devmgmt.msc > OK or Start > Right-click "Computer" > Manage > Device Manager)
- Expand the Network adapters section on the list.
- Locate the applicable network adapter and right-click on it > Uninstall (do NOT check the box for "Delete the driver software for this device")
- Click OK
- When completed, reboot the laptop
B) Another possibility is the NIC is not recovering from either sleep/hibernation mode that might be in use by the operating system or the sleep mode the operating system puts the network adapter to save power.
If applicable, try disabling Deep Sleep (S3) mode in BIOS or Hibernation mode in Control Panel > Power Options (or Start > Run > powercfg.cpl > OK).
To prevent the operating system turning the network adapter off:
- Open Device Manager (START > RUN > devmgmt.msc > OK or Start > Right-click "Computer" > Manage > Device Manager)
- Expand the Network adapters section on the list.
- Locate the applicable network adapter and double-click on it
- Select Power Management tab
- Clear/Uncheck the "Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power" option on top.
Workaround A; is what I typically do when the wireless adapter seems to be installed but either the user can connect to any available Wi-Fi connections listed or nothing shows up on the list even though the related services and network adapter appeared to be running as designed.
Last edited by TurcoLoco; 09-30-2015 at 04:00 PM..
Use the router to assign a particular IP address to each computer based on the MAC address.
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