Internet dying at regular intervals

[Ohh_No]

For the past month or so I've been experiencing internet disconnects at fairly regular intervals. These disconnects quite literally last less than a second. By the time I've disconnected from Ventrilo/TS/Mumble, I can IMMEDIATELY reconnect as though nothing had happened. My network status never even switches to 'no connection or limited connectivity'. My internet will not die in the 'middle' of an hour - only at the top of the hour, or shortly after. I've been keeping track of exact times when I disconnect, here's a preview:

2:06
4:07
5:04
1:09
6:05
7:05
8:07

And so on. I've uninstalled a fuckload of programs thinking those could be culprit. Checking my modem and router logs has yielded no results as they are indicating full uptime and no drops in connection. My IP claims there are no problems on their end and more-or-less told me to fuck off. Furthermore, these outages only appear to affect my computer, not the entire network. The almost clockwork disconnects lead me to believe it is something on my computer causing them, but the Scheduled Tasks thing was mindbogglingly hard to navigate through.

Any help here would be appreciated, because I'm tired of saying 'hold on guys my internet is about to disconnect, I need to safe up'

[LarkinAlpha]

My system has been doing the same thing, disconnecting for around a second at predictable time periods. I haven't charted them myself, but I suspect some sort of rogue application. The oddest thing is that at times most programs will just treat it like a rather large series of dropped packets and just lag out till the connection reestablishes, rather than outright crash (this includes EVE).

Using Vista (lol that's the problem) which is otherwise stable.

[Loganbacca]

Just an idea; try checking your ethernet (or wireless) card properties in device manager, when your in there have a look at the "Power Management" tab and check that it isn't enabled.

[Ohh_No]

It was turned on. Turning it off to see if that makes a difference. It's a desktop though, so I don't see why it would be turning it off to save power.

[Ohh_No]

That did not fix it.

[fffuuu]

if you're running win7, try watching resource monitor's network tab while it fails, maybe that might point to the culprit.

[LarkinAlpha]

Just an idea; try checking your ethernet (or wireless) card properties in device manager, when your in there have a look at the "Power Management" tab and check that it isn't enabled.

Mine was on as well, will see if I have problems this week.

[Loganbacca]

Just an idea; try checking your ethernet (or wireless) card properties in device manager, when your in there have a look at the "Power Management" tab and check that it isn't enabled.

Mine was on as well, will see if I have problems this week.
For some reason Microsoft seems to set all the power management stuff to "on" by default. It's a shame it didn't fix your problem Ohh_No, but it was worth a shot, it'll be interesting to see if it fixes yours though Larkin.

Not related to this problem, but if you ever have a USB device fail intermittently, try checking the power management settings of all the USB hubs. We get this at work occasionally with our wireless mice/keyboards failing after the network admins push through a new user policy to turn all the power saving settings back on :roll:

[Ohh_No]

Yesterday's outages that I was there to write down:

2:06
4:07

Today's outages that I was there to write down (so far):

2:10
4:11

That's +4 minutes over yesterday. I predict tomorrow's outages to be 2:14 and 4:15, additionally 1:13 tonight.

Edit: If I make an effort to watch the network monitor when it drops, what exactly am I looking for?

[Ohh_No]

I took a screenshot of my network monitor thing about 6 seconds after my internet went down. This blue bar that I hadn't seen all day was suddenly there and super high up.

http://i.imgur.com/kszxd.png

Edit: I don't know what any of this means, please help me

Edit2: When my internet is stable, local area network activity is at 0%

[ThonEney]

Try runing wireshark (http://www.wireshark.org/) and post the logs, run it a few mins before it happens. Oh and turn off msn/browser before running it wouldn't want to capture personal messages.

[Ohh_No]

Predicting another outage in just under 30 minutes. I'll start running it then.

[Verizana]

have u tried talking to your ISP? also take a look at your router during one of those "outages"

[fffuuu]

have u tried talking to your ISP? also take a look at your router during one of those "outages"

^ didn't read the OP.

if you haven't come up with anything via wireshark or resource manager, would suggest two things:

1: Driver update for NIC or motherboard whatever.

2: GG, reinstall windows.

[LarkinAlpha]

Mine didn't get fixed by turning it off. And yeah, I figure a re-install would fix it, but :lazy:

[Aea]

One possible thing it could be is DHCP addresses not-renewing. Does your internal IP address change during the downtimes?

[Goldsnake]

One possible thing it could be is DHCP addresses not-renewing. Does your internal IP address change during the downtimes?

he did mention that it was only that one pc on the network having that issue but it could be worth looking at - also a one hour lease seems really short, most home routers would have about 12 hours by default setting.

Run 'ipconfig /all' in command prompt, copy pasta results for adapter into here, should look something like:


Ethernet adapter Local Area Connection:

Connection-specific DNS Suffix . : derbymoor.derby.sch.uk
Description . . . . . . . . . . . : Realtek RTL8168C(P)/8111C(P) Family PCI-E
Gigabit Ethernet NIC (NDIS 6.20)
Physical Address. . . . . . . . . : 00-1F-D0-8D-08-5C
DHCP Enabled. . . . . . . . . . . : Yes
Autoconfiguration Enabled . . . . : Yes
IPv4 Address. . . . . . . . . . . : 10.25.68.1(Preferred)
Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.248.0
Lease Obtained. . . . . . . . . . : 16 June 2011 06:30:48
Lease Expires . . . . . . . . . . : 16 June 2011 18:30:48
Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : 10.25.64.1
DHCP Server . . . . . . . . . . . : 10.25.64.36
DNS Servers . . . . . . . . . . . : 10.25.64.36
10.25.64.37
NetBIOS over Tcpip. . . . . . . . : Enabled

The important bit for you is seeing the 'lease obtained/expires' bits, if that matches your disconnects we've found the problem.
The solution would then be to set a manual ip address for the pc.

Also, don't have uTorrent running in the background for a couple of days.