Wi-fi down... sort of. What broke?

[DarkAudit]

Occasionally I will return to my desk after sleep or otherwise afk for an extended period and find my laptop disconnected from the internet a couple of hours before. Cycling the wi-fi switch will usually bring the connection back up.

But here's where it gets odd. The cable connection never went down. I never lost the link.

The internet may be down on wi-fi, but the connection to the internal network is fine. I can access everything inside the house just like before. I just can't access the internet. And this doesn't happen with a wired connection. If the internet goes down while on that, the cable link is also down.

So where's the culprit? Is the wi-fi on the laptop going bad? Is the wireless router (Netgear WGA2000) ripe for replacement? What's going on?

 

[@Li3n]

If refreshing it makes the link work (and it happens after afk) it might be some sort of power save setting...

Don't you have any other wi-fi device to test the connection on?

Otherwise i have no clue, i just recently got wi-fi myself, and i don't use it much (no wireless in my PC, and the laptops are from mothers workplace).

 

[DarkAudit]

It's not always after a prolonged idle. I've seen it happen while in the middle of use, but very rarely.

I'm tempted to swap out the Netgear router with a Linksys one, as that's quicker and cheaper than sending the laptop out to be checked. Besides, I'm not all that pleased with the Netgear's UI. Slow. As. Fuck.

 

[Shakey]

You could try putting in your IP address/gateway/dns manually.

Sounds more like a network problem than a computer problem.

 

[SpecialKO]

Some quick pre-questions before you switch your router.

Do you have an EEE pc, Macbook, or other computer whose networking bits are manufactured by Asus (this includes many netbooks)?

Do you live in an area where there are lots of wi-fi networks within range (and do you know what kind they are, B/G/N/etc)?

When was the last time you upgraded the Java installation on your computer?

 

[Jay]

Go to Device Manager and find your wireless card under network adapters and double-click it. Verify that there aren't any auto power management settings enabled that might be shutting your card down.

It can be as simple as a driver update that brought this new... "feature".

 

[figmentPez]

Do you have an EEE pc, Macbook, or other computer whose networking bits are manufactured by Asus (this includes many netbooks)?

Not to steal someone else's thread, but I've got an Asus Eee that often won't reconnect to my network after waking up from sleep. Is this a known issue and is there a fix?

 

[SpecialKO]

Well, hopefully DA's problem is just a power saver thing, but the deal here is two-fold:

1) Most wi-fi routers, by default, automatically select a radio band channel. For w/e reason, this usually ends up being channel 1, 6, or 11, resulting in a lot of wi-fi networks ending up on the same channel, and more easily interfere with one another. I don't know why this is, I assume it's because they're all made to the same ISO spec or something.

2) Asus-built laptop mobos made in pre-2010 use a poorly-coded Java instruction for wi-fi cards to regulate their power-saving, constantly cycling them between hi and lo depending on usage (which makes sense on paper). In practice, "low" can actually be low enough to lose signal from the router. Normally, not such a big problem with auto-re-connect, but if you live in an area where there are a lot of overlapping networks (apartment block, high-density residential, dorm, municipal wi-fi, etc) or even cell-phone towers since they occupy the same general band, they can interfere with one another, and if your Asus-built wi-fi card is still in a state of low-power it may not be able to tune in properly over the static, and will then shut down upon failure, needing to be manually toggled to turn back on.

How my Macbook was fixed:

1) Took it to the Genius bar (known issue for them), they removed the Java installation entirely, then rebuilt the OS around an updated version of Java. (network card more or less fixed)
2) I downloaded iStumblr, scanned all my local wi-fi networks, and manually set my wi-fi router to broadcast on a channel that no one else was using and was also as far from the used channels as possible.

Haven't had a problem since.

 

[figmentPez]

Well, hopefully DA's problem is just a power saver thing, but the deal here is two-fold:

1) Most wi-fi routers, by default, automatically select a radio band channel. For w/e reason, this usually ends up being channel 1, 6, or 11, resulting in a lot of wi-fi networks ending up on the same channel, and more easily interfere with one another. I don't know why this is, I assume it's because they're all made to the same ISO spec or something.

The reason for 1, 6 or 11 is that all the other channels overlap with those channels. The freqencies used by 2 overlap mostly with 1, but a little with 6. It's only possible to have 3 full speed wireless networks working in the 2.4Ghz spectrum (802.11a is 5.8Ghz, and n can be.) Using 2 - 5 will slow down channel 1 because it uses some of the same frequencies.

2) Asus-built laptop mobos made in pre-2010 use a poorly-coded Java instruction for wi-fi cards to regulate their power-saving,...

Hmm, I don't think that can be my problem. I only get issues when resuming from sleep, not always, and the problem is odd. The network icon will say not connected, and when I click on that for options it'll say I'm not connected to my network, but the button to connect says "Disconnect" and even if I do disconnect, trying to reconnect just ends up in that same broken state. Sometimes I can fix it by choosing "repair my connection" but most of the time that doesn't respond at all.

Oh well, it's a cheap laptop that works a lot better than I thought it would. I can live with a minor quirk. Maybe it won't be there in Windows 7 after I upgrade.

 

[DarkAudit]

Laptop is an Acer Aspire 5740-5780. Hadn't noticed before, but the list of networks in the neighborhood is longer than I thought. Most have a "poor" signal, but they made the list. Switched router channel to 8 from "auto" to see if that makes any difference.

 

[PatrThom]

Could also just be lease expiration (while the computer was asleep) or something as simple as another source of wifi signal (another computer, a cordless phone, or even the use of a microwave oven) raising the noise level enough so that the signal was lost.

See if it happens when you have a webpage up that autorefreshes every once in a while (or something else which keeps periodic net activity going) to keep the connection alive (and the computer awake).

--Patrick

 

[DarkAudit]

I usually keep xchat up even when I'm asleep. I can tell from the timestamps when the connection went down. It happened again over my weekend, and stayed down until I reset wi-fi on the laptop. Didn't have anything else using wireless at the time, so there's nothing to compare to

It's going to be a non-issue soon, as the laptop will be removed from prime system status, and wireless will be used much less frequently.