Blogger Rick Fairlie at ZDnet has posted a story that outlines a strategy for dealing with Wi-Fi links that come up and work, however briefly, but then go down and refuse to come back up until you reboot your notebook PC. Having suffered from this phenomenon myself on numerous notebooks–I test ’em for <a href=”http://www.tomsguide.com” target=”_blank”>TomsGuide.com</a>, to the tune of between one and two dozen new notebooks per year–I was definitely interested to read and learn from his advice.
In a nutshell, he recommends making sure your runtime environment is up to date particularly where the notebook and its networking components are concerned. This means taking the following steps:
- reboot the cable or DSL modem and your router (in that order), because this can be a common cause for such problems. At my house this drill means rebooting the WebSTAR to re-establish a working Internet link, then rebooting the router to let it set up all of its filters and controls on that newly-running link.
- Update your notebook’s BIOS (Fairlie provides a useful how-to on this process, which I just went through earlier this month to prep my notebook for an XP to Vista upgrade)
- Update the wireless drivers for Vista (see my Tips and Tricks article “Smart Use of DriverAgent Improves Driver Update Results”
- Make sure you deselect IPv6 as a usable networking protocol (unless you use it, of course) in Wireless Network Connections Properties for your wireless interface, because so many SOHO routers have trouble coping with IPv6
The upshot of this drill: no dropped signals. For the complete details on this story, see http://blogs.zdnet.com/soho-networking/?p=223&tag=nl.e539.
–Ed–
