Hey, everyone. I’m usually computer-savvy, bu this one has me stumped. My laptop has had perfect wireless internet connectivity for months without incident, and suddenly it’s freaking out. Whenever the laptop is closed, turned off, or goes to sleep on its own due to inactivity, it seems to be completely and totally losing its connection to my wireless router. I mean upon opening it, it has to go through an entire ~1 minute process of finding the network, acquiring an address, acquiring an IP address, doing some other stuff - when it used to just immediately connect. Even weirder, it’s now doing a lot of strange behavior like saying/displaying in the taskbar that the connection is down or unconnected even though it is in fact working normally. Just spazzville.
The only thing that I’ve changed recently has been switching my router’s security from WPA to WEP, with a new password for all connected devices. Nothing else on the network - game systems, Ipod Touch, desktop - seems to be having any issues.
A recent thread discussed the possible relationship between security settings and unstable connections. Change the security system back to WPA and see if your connection behaves normally.
I guess it wouldn’t hurt to try both of those. The thing with WPA is that it’s a RIDICULOUSLY long password - something like 20 or 30 random characters, mixed upper- and lower-case - and it’s a huge pain in the butt for when people are over and want to get online, or when I’m trying to get a new device without a keyboard connected to wi-fi. I also heard that WPA is slower than WEP, and I really don’t need that much security anyway.