Network (wired + wireless) loses connectoin randomly, requires restart

Hello,

I have a problem, and it appears to have been for there for a while. I have 2 wired computers on my network, and maybe 2-4 wireless computers, that aren't always on.

I use 2 computers, one laptop wireless, and one desktop wired. (laptop = XP, desktop = Vistax64)

The laptop one day suddenly kept dropping connections to the net, but a re-enabling of the network card would usually solve the problem. Then it would drop randomly again

after that. I thought it was something wrong with my computer, so I reformatted it, but the problem kept coming back. But now I don't use that laptop much anymore so that

doesn't worry me.

However, I bought new tower desktop (the wired one) with high end specs (i.e., Q9550 64 bit processor and whatever else comes with a high end computer), and this uses a wired

connection to the router. I've bought it for only 1 month. The ethernet cable is also new.

The router is a D-Link DI-624. (2.5-3 years already)

Less frequently, this desktop also started disconnecting randomly, but more of these disconnections occurred during the times I would use this to play online Warcraft 3 games,

rather than me surfing the net and using MSN Messenger.

The difference here is that, with the desktop, I can't re-enable the ethernet card, because in the Device manager, the window crashes when I right click for the drop down

window on my Network Adapters list. (This doesn't happen when the network is working). The Networks and Sharing Center also takes ages to load, and sometimes never loads, just

hangs. Everything else in Windows works perfectly fine.

I am not sure if they are the same problem. However one other laptop (Windows vista) met the same issue as the desktop. It had the same crashes in the same places, the network

sharing centre would hang as well.

For the desktop and that other laptop, only a reboot would solve the problem. I don't know if it is because the Vista laptop accessed the networks using windows and if windows

had an error then the connection couldn't be repaired. However, with my XP-laptop, the network was managed by Intel Pro Wireless, and the problem could be solved with a simple

reenabling, but would recur MORE FREQUENTLY.

I have yet to check the network IP status of the computers during a connection-down, but pulling out the cable to my desktop does not solve the problem. Neither does resetting

the router.


What I do know is, for my laptop and my desktop, a disconnection on the laptop doesn't mean a disconnection on the desktop. Vice versa I don't know as of yet.

The disconnections for the laptop seemed to start after I assigned WPA-TKIP keys to the network, but an ethernet cable connection to the desktop means that the problem should

be independent of the pass keys.

With the second desktop that I mentioned, I have yet to see it disconnect or hear of other people complaining about disconnection (maybe because I rarely use it).

Has anyone else experienced this problem? I don't want to get a new router before knowing the problem because if it isn't the router then I would have used my money for

nothing.

Thanks! [Edit: ALL MY DRIVERS ARE UP TO DATE ACCORDING TO VISTA, INCLUDING FIRMWARE FOR THE ROUTER, OF WHICH NEW FIRMWARE IS UNAVAILABLE ON THE DLINK WEBSITE]

-dcde2004