I have been having a weird problem lately. My computer will disconnect from my wireless internet for short periods of time. I have XP Pro, but it doesn’t say that the connection is lost. I lose all connectivity through browsing, p2p, and other apps. I am using a Linksys USB Wireless Adapter to connect to my Linksys Wireless AP. Any ideas of what could be causing this?
Does it come back up without a restart? If so, it could be your ISP. ATTBI around here will go down for a few minutes from time to time.
Are there other computers you can use to test? A (formerly used) wired network?
I have the same LinkSys router with the same problem. I recently upgraded the BIOS from the LinkSys website, and the problem has gone away magically.
FTR, until I managed to get the patch to install, I found that renewing the DHCP lease would fix the problem for 5 to 30 minutes at a time (“ipconfig /renew” from the command line). That gets old pretty quickly, though.
I’ve got one of those voodoo-mystic sneaky suspicions its to do with power management settings.
I’ve got one of those voodoo-mystic sneaky suspicions its to do with power management settings.
If you’ve got power saving features enabled it might be that the adapter is obviously drawing power to function, but the computer soesn’t realise that the device is actually doing stuff - it looks at it and thinks “ooh i can save some power here” and disables the device without telling you.
Then when you restart the computer it obviously starts functioning again.
This is probably why upgrading the BIOS solved the problem - because the new BIOS defaults for power management may have been slightly different from the old ones.
Thats my gut feeling anyway.
Ah hell - i’m probably wrong - i’m just a humble web-techie not a hardware techie 
I went to Control Panel, and opened up the Device Manager, and under the properties of the USB device, there was a checked box that said “Enable the computer to turn off this device to save power.” Uncheck, problem gone.
Wow! I have been having trouble with my LAN that I set up using Windows XP. Since I just switched from 98, I had no idea Windows XP would shut off the connection to my LAN (stupid bastards). That explains why the other computer running 98 works and mine using XP shuts off regularly. Thanks garius and Stccrd.
Yeah i know - i’m great
tries to fit head through door