Laptop Drops From Network, Won't Reconnect

[dustinbrown]

Netgear WGR614v7 Router

I have three computers wi-fi networked via the Netgear router: a laptop, a Mac Mini, and a XBox 360.

About 30% of the time, when I wake my laptop up, it's been dropped from the network. The only thing that seems to allow it to connect again is if I unplug the power from the router and plug it back in again.

This also happens to the XBox 360 once and a while. It never happens to the Mini. I suspect the Mini never gets dropped because it never gets turned off or goes to sleep.

Some things I've tried to no avail:
- restarting my laptop
- manually reconnecting to the network via the icon in the system tray
- ipconfig /release, /renew
- disabling power management on my network adapter
- updating my router's firmware

My research keeps pointing to my router's "idle timeout" setting, though that may or may not actually be the problem. In my router setup, I currently have the "Does Your Internet Connection Require A Login?" setting set to No. When it's set to No, I do not have access to my Idle Timeout setting. If I set Login Required to Yes, I do have access to Idle Timeout, but none of my computers can connect, and I'm unsure how to get that working properly. I've read that if I set Idle Timeout to 0 (zero), it essentially never times out.

 

[Saga Lout]

A Windows laptop loses power when it sleeps and changing the adapter's power management doesn't alter that. The only change you can make is to prevent sleeping - all options set to "Never".