I have a (new) Dell laptop running Windows 7, and a (new) Belkin wireless router, and I am having connectivity problems. Dozens of times a day, I get a message telling me the connection was reset, the site could be temporarily unavailable or busy, and to check the network connection, and making sure my browser (Firefox) has permission to access the web.
No site in particular causes this, and there are not certain times of day when it happens. It’s completely indiscriminate, and sometimes takes a half dozen refreshes to get it load the page.
Help?
Do you have cordless phones at your house? If so, they could be on the same channel as your router. You could try changing the router’s channel, or the phones’.
I have had similar problems with Belkin routers dropping the connection and reseting repeatedly both wired and WiFi. Tried flashing the firmware to the latest version with no improvment. Only way I solved the problem was to replace the router with a different brand, I have had good results with LinkSys brand routers but YMMV.
I had a similar problem that had me tearing my hair out… I swapped out the router with another one that I had; same issue.
It turned out to be a bad ethernet cable between the modem and router.
Can you tell if you’re actually getting knocked off your local network (i.e., your wireless connection is dropping), or are you just sometimes/often unable to reach a site in your web browser?
When you get knocked off your wireless network you’ll often get some kind of indication from your systray, possibly a popup tooltip saying “Limited or no connectivity,” etc.
I am very rarely knocked off the network, and that’s usually fixed by a modem reset, so it’s not that.
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Astroboy: **I’ll try the ethernet cable fix!
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Zipper: **how do I do that?
Channel settings are in the wireless router’s configuration panel. Go to 192.168.2.1 in your browser (I’m assuming that’s your router’s IP address, based on a random Belkin wireless router manual I am looking at online), which will bring up the configuration application. You’ll need to hunt around for the channel setting option, but it’s there.
Changing channels is definitely the first thing to do. Other wireless networks, cordless phones and microwaves can all cause problems. If all of your gear is 5GHz capable, that might work better.
However, I’ve found that most consumer wireless routers are just junk. Sometimes they’ll be fine for years, sometimes they stop working very quickly. The biggest problem I’ve noticed is that they tend to overheat. When they overheat, they misbehave in various ways. The most common one I had with several Linksys routers I went through was that the router would appear to still be running fine, but the wireless network would just disappear. Rebooting the router usually made it work ok for a while, but then it would happen again (sometimes in an hour sometimes in a week). Eventually I gave up and bought a better quality router, and the problems went away. But if your router is sitting somewhere that it’s not getting good ventilation, or is near some other device that puts off heat (tv, computer, A/V receiver, etc.), it may be worth moving it a bit.