I use Verizon FIOS and a Verizon-supplied wireless router to connect to the internet in my New York City apartment.
Every day at about 9:10 p.m., my Windows 7 laptop loses its connection to the internet for about 5 minutes. Specifically, the wireless signal strength indicator on the lower left of my screen grows a little yellow triangle with an exclamation point, and when I hover over it, it says “No Internet Access.” When I open the “Network and Sharing Center,” the little picture shows my computer connected with my wireless network, but a red X between the wireless network and the internet. During this time, I cannot open web pages or therwise access the internet. A few minutes later, without me doing anything, the situation resolves itself, the yellow triangle goes away, and the picture shows my computer, my wireless network and the internet all happily connected.
The strange thing is that while this is going on, other wireless internet connections are operating just fine. For instance, the iPad can be playing a Netflix movie from the internet with no connection loss while the computer’s internet connection is lost.
I suspect that there is something resetting in my laptop’s internet connection (but not that of the other devices) every day at that time.
So, does anyone have any idea of what might be happening, and how to stop it from doing so, or at least move it to a less annoying dime of day?
No idea, I have Charter Communications internet, and every overnight at about 330 am my internet tanks. I shut down and go play backgammon against the computer or something until I see all my little lights blinking showing I have connectivity again.
Charter tells me there is nothing wrong and I am imagining it.
This could take a Sherlock Holmes to solve, possibly.
Some anecdotes I’ve read of:
(1) A certain computer in a business office crashed every day at the same time and had to be rebooted. Resolution: At just a certain time of day, sunlight coming in the window reflected off the bottle in the office water cooler and onto the side of the CPU box, heating it up until it got memory errors and the system crashed.
(2) A certain computer in a business office crashed multiple times every day at rather regular and predictable times. Resolution: There was a subway tube running under the building, with a joint or some connection in the overhead electric wires that the trolley rode on. Every time a train passed there, the trolley made sparks at that spot. The EMF thus created was enough to crash the computer in the office above.
To add to Senegoid’s anecdotes, when I was in college (many years ago) we had a microwave link that connected the computer networks from the college’s two campuses. Every night at 7 pm the link would go down. We ended up tracing it down to a bar near one of the campuses. Every time they turned on their neon sign, the link went down. We had to move the RF antenna to fix the problem.
Probably not helpful to the OP, since the problem only affects the laptop. If there were some kind of noise event killing it I would expect it to completely take out the wifi.
The OP might want to get in contact with Verizon. Most routers have some sort of logging, and there might be something in the logs that would say why things are disconnecting.
Every evening one of your neighbours comes home from work and sticks a frozen meal in the microwave oven?
A loss of connection and immediate reconnect could be from many things, but a 5 minute outage limits things a lot. Also, if the time is exact, or approximate makes a difference too. Exact suggests a technical reason.
Two places I have worked lose connectivity for just long enough to be painful at very close to 4:30pm. I am pretty sure that in both cases the culprit is a monitored burglar alarm that shares the physical line with the ADSL calling home for its periodic sanity check.
Is your computer set to refresh its IP daily? Unfortunately, I am at work, and I have no administrative priveleges on this machine, so I can’t walk you through the steps to check, but I know there is a way to control how often your computer will refresh its IP address.
Is it possible to plug the laptop in via ethernet cable? If so, I would do that just before the normal reset time and see if it still happens. This will give us a clue as to whether it’s something with your laptop’s wifi adapter only, or your networking in general.
Also, check your event viewer for that time period (Start -> type “Event Viewer…” in search box, it should find it -> check all logs under “Windows Logs”)
We used to lose internet every night at a predicatable time, just like the OP, and it was caused by our ISP resetting our connection. We generally had a different IP address after the switch.
OP, could your iPad be silently switching to your data plan for a few minutes, making it seem like it never loses its internet connection? Does your IP address stay the same after the interuption?
I’ve checked through the Event Viewer and I couldn’t find anything occurring at about the time my computer can’t connect with the internet.
The idea that my computer is updating something at that time could make sense. How can I see if my computer is refreshing my IP address at that time, or even what my computer’s IP address is, so I check if it is changing?
This requires some clarification. If you have a router – any kind of router – then the router itself has an IP address. In fact, your router has two IP addresses – an “inside address” that is only known and used between your router and your in-house machines that are connected to it (whether wirelessly or wirefully); and a separate “outside address” by which your router communicates with the outside world.
Your individual computers also each have their own “inside addresses”, by which they communicate with the router and with each other. Likewise, this is true whether they are wireless or wireful. All of these inside addresses typically begin with 10.x.y.z or with 192.168.x.y
To find your computer’s “inside IP address”, the DOS command is IPCONFIG. There may be other windows-based utilities as well. To find your router’s “outside IP address”, you need to know how to log into your router from your computer; the information in generally conspicuously displayed there. A typical way is:
[ul]
[li] Open your browser.[/li][li] In the address bar, type the “inside address” of your router. This is typically something like 192.168.0.1 but varies from one router to another. You may find it printed on a label on your router.[/li][li] It will probably display a box demanding a user-name or password or some magic code number. With any luck, you will find this information on that sticker on your router too.[/li][li] The “home page” of your router generally shows all the basic pertinent statistics, like your “outside IP address”.[/li][/ul]
The IP address allocation is via the DHCP service. Typically your router acts as a DHCP server, and any computer connecting to it - either via a wired or WiFi connection requests an IP address from it as part of setting up the connection. DHCP allocated addresses typically have a lifetime - so that the server is able to reclaim them and not eventually run out. The lifetime is the “lease time”. Typically 8 or 24 hours is the lease time, but they can be shorter. Once the lease runs out your laptop needs to request a new IP address lease. You are not guaranteed the same IP address across leases unless the router is set up to know about your laptop and is explicitly configured to always provide the same address to it. Normally IP re-releasing is seamless. However if the IP address changes across leases you will be relying on the NAT service in the router to keep track of what and where any connections are maintained. It may be that it it messing this up.
The big X however suggests that your laptop does not have a valid IP address lease. So, you may want to check the setup of IP address allocation and DHCP setup on the router.
Google knows all. Seriously, lots of sites will tell you what your outside IP address is, so I went to Google, typed in “ip address”, to find one, and right at the top, it says