G530 Causes Intermittent Network Drops for All Machines on Network

[StevenLevy]

I have a new G530 (Vista Home Premium, 3GB RAM) which is exhibiting weird behavior. Whenever it is on my home network, it causes all machines on the network to lose Internet connectivity for a few seconds every 30 seconds or so. Everything on network is fine, then I connect the G530 -- either turn on the wireless switch or plug in a cable. From then on, the network connectivity is periodically interrupted.

Here's what I know:

• I've have plugged and unplugged everything for over a week. It is this machine causing the problem. I can repeat it on command by switching on the Lenovo's wireless switch or plugging in the LAN cable.
• The network runs through a DLink wireless/wired router. The wireless part is WEP encrypted.
• The machines on the network are a mix of Vista Premium, Vista Basic, XP, Win2000, and an HP wireless printer. They all display the intermittent network issue when the Lenovo is connected.
• The Lenovo itself exhibits the problem when connected.
• I have done repeated IPConfig /release --> /renew on all of the machines. At one point I did a manual inspection and there were no duplicate IP addresses.
• The Lenovo worked fine connected wirelessly to the local public library's network.
• One DLink suggestion was to give the wireless and wired LANs different names. I tried that. Problem still occurs.
• It's not the modem; we switched from DSL to cable modem this week thinking -- thanks to some misleading advice from our DSL provider -- that the DSL modem was dying. The problem is the same now with the cable modem as it was with the DSL modem.
• I can observe the problem on the non-Vista machines easily because the taskbar pops up every time the network connects or disconnects. (Vista has fixed this particular annoyance.) The message is that a network cable is unplugged.
• It's the same issue whether the Lenovo is connected wirelessly or via Ethernet.

Any ideas? Thoughts? Suggestions? Shoulders to cry on? Otherwise it's a wonderful machine, but I need a computer, not a network killer....

Thanks,

  -- Steve

[Esteban_Lenovo]

Hi Steven,

Have you tried this with a different router? What happens when you log in places other than your house's network? Do the router lights show any changes (usually green to ambar, or on to off, depending on the router) when the disconnections occur?

There are a number of reasons why this could be happening. I'm tempted to blame IPv6 native support on vista, but, since you have other Vista PCs connected this might not be the case. 

That being said you might want to try disabling IPv6 (since it is easy to do)

On the Run box type: ncpa.cpl (hit enter)

Select the network connection, right click -> properties 

uncheck Internet Protocol Version 6 and confirm. 

Regards, 

[carbon_unit · Accepted solution]

I had a Linksys WRT54G router go bad a couple years ago that exhibited the same behavior.

[StevenLevy]

Thanks. Disabling IPv6 didn't help, so I guess it's change-out-the-router time. This is a weird router with a cool industrial design... until you actually try to read the lights, which are so small and hidden as to be useless. I'll update the thread on how that works this afternoon.

[StevenLevy]

It looks like it might have been the router. The killer with intermittent problems is that they're... well, intermittent. How do you prove that something isn't happening? Anyway, I replaced the router, and we've been okay for an hour. I'm not quite ready to call it solved yet, but I'm hopeful. Thanks for the suggestions.

[Esteban_Lenovo]

Steven,

I'd love to know how this ended. Was it the router after all? 

Regards, 

[StevenLevy]

Yes, it was the router. Weird that it was only this one machine with which it was having an adverse reaction... but that was one machine too many. Thanks for your help and suggestions.

[BECMA222]

Steven,

What router did you replace your DLINK? I have the same occurence on my IdeaPadY430,

Rey