Vista - Wireless Drops Randomly & After Sleep

Hi again everyone. I'm finally getting this laptop sorted out, but it still has one definite problem with wireless connectivity. It's an Acer Aspire 5810T with Vista Home Premium SP1, router is a Belkin.

Pretty much every time I bring it out of sleep, the wireless connection to the internet is lost. It loses internet randomly during normal use, and I can usually resolve that by disconnecting/reconnecting from the network. However, after sleeping that won't restore Internet access. I get a good connection to the network, but it's "Local Only." I also noticed I can't access my router via the browser either.

The Windows diagnose & repair thing says it's a problem with the modem or router and recommends rebooting those (way to pass the buck, Vista. :P) All other computers are running XP Pro never have this problem, never had it on my old XP laptop, etc.

I already updated wireless drivers by going into the device manager and selecting "Update driver software," and disabled the power saving option to "turn off this device to save power" for both network adapters. The router firmware is up to date. Help?

Note: I found this: http://www.chicagotech.net/netforums...asc&highlight= Not sure if it's applicable? Is it worth a shot?

Thanks everyone! I promise to give back to this forum after a few more months and I'm a Vista master.

Hi Mousetopher,

I too have had occasional weird problems after waking my Dell 1537 laptop running Vista Home Premium 64bit from sleep mode. Instead of sleep I've been trying hibernate mode instead. I created a desktop icon which I click when I want to put the laptop in hibernate mode. To try this, create a desktop icon. In the shortcut tab:

Target: System32\rundll32.exe PowProf.dll.SetSuspendState
Start in: C:\Windows\system32

I've also changed sleep to hibernate or shutdown in my power options.

So far so good,
Sky

M

It sounds like its losing IP when it goes to sleep and the router is n ot refreshing the ip. Nest time this happens try ipconfig/renew if it fixes the problem thats what it was

Hope this helps

Ken

Thank you for your advice, Sky and Ken.

I checked my power options, and I don't see the option to hibernate anywhere. When I choose "change what to do when I close the lid" I see: Shut down, Sleep, and Do Nothing. And truly, I'm more interested to know why it's doing what it's doing, , rather than just working around it.

When I opened the computer up this morning (after it'd been sleeping all night) it was having the network issue, so I rebooted to resolve it. Right after that I left it alone for about half an hour and it automatically went to sleep. When I started it back up, it detected the network and worked just fine. Not sure if that indicates anything significant. :P

I'll do the ipconfig /renew next time the problem presents and see what happens. Thanks for your help!

Hi mousetopher,

Might be that hibernate in my power options is a Dell feature. Regarding "why" verses "working around it", my take is that there are so many different motherboards and controllers that Vista's sleep might not work 100% of the time on all hardware. So rather than spend hours trying to fix a problem that requires the manufacturer to fix, I just decided to use hibernate.

If you get to the point of giving up, maybe try the desktop shortcut I posted to hibernate.

If you ever find the fix for your problem, please do post it here.
Good luck,
Sky

I Have A Acer Aspire 5920, In My House I Have A Beklin Wireless Router And Every So Often When I Am Surfing The Web If Suddenely Disconnects And Then Reconnects To Next Doors Wifi. Any Ideas Why?

Hi rikky,

I think you will have a better chance of getting answers to your question if you start a new thread since it is on a different subject. But for now, have you secured your Belkin router by changing the logon, password and encryption? I'm wondering if someone is not trying to access your router when it switches.

If you start a new thread, I'll follow up there.

Sky

Gee, thanks, Sky. ;P

Okay, so random update. My network connection's been acting up today during regular use. Periodically, and for no apparent reason, I'll notice web pages in the browser slowing and becoming unresponsive, and the connection changes from "Local and Internet" to "Local Only" or "Limited Connectivity." It'll usually resolve itself after a few minutes, but disconnecting/reconnecting to the network speeds things along.

Just now it was doing this, so I did the ipconfig/renew like Ken suggested with no success. The latter half of it reads like this:

I did have a connection to the network, but couldn't access the router. In this case, it sorted itself out in the time it took me to record the ipconfig results.

Interestingly enough, another intermittant problem related to Windows Live Mail seems to occur more frequently when all this is going on. WLM appears to shut down fine, but won't start up when I click its icon. I have to kill the process, then it works fine but says something like: "WLM did not shut down correctly, and is not displaying the last post you viewed in case that was the problem."

There might also be a correlation between the problem and the number of people using the internet at the same time, though it's hard to tell. Oh, and I have one of those Verizon broadband cards, and haven't noticed this problem when using it.

Anybody have any thoughts?

Would you by chance be running WLM with IMAP accounts?
Sky

Two live accounts and a hotmail. account.

By the way, here's the message I get after doing an ipconfig/renew (while presenting above symptoms after sleeping all night

An error occurred while renewing interface wireless network connection : unable to contact your dhcp server. request has timed out.