Network Blips

[captainspud]

Our house was hit by lightning a month ago. It fried one of our routers, and my computer's network has been suffering "blips" since then. The rest of the network is fine, but my computer loses connection for about five minutes; these blips happen in intervals of anywhere from fifteen minutes to two hours.

I at first assumed it was a hardware thing from the surge, but installing a separate network card had no effect-- whether on the Mobo network jack or on the card, the blips are identical. My most recent discovery: when the network blips out, it can immediately be fixed. I go into "Network Connections" in the control panel, right-click on the Local Area Connection, and hit Repair. This renews all my network crap, and I'm back up.

Needless to say, this is a very annoying problem. Any theories on what's causing it? Even better, anybody know of a way to fix it? It's really frustrating when I'm uploading a 500mb file to my server and my network crashes 80% of the way through. :(

[zuludelta]

When you say that the "rest" of the network is fine... do you mean to say that all the other computers connected to the network besides yours can access the internet with no problems, or is the random, intermittent network disconnection a problem shared by all the computers connected to the network?

I don't know if you can totally rule out a hardware issue even though a "known good" network card suffers from the same issues. It could be that the damage to your system occurred between the network card connection and the CPU (i.e., somewhere on the mobo or even on the CPU circuitry itself), or it could have screwed up your PC's PSU, leading to uneven current. There's probably no sure way to know unless you use a PCI-based motherboard test card, among other things. Diagnosing the effects of surge damage on PCs can be a tricky thing. I've seen cases where "unconditioned" power can damage data stored on hard drives. An electrical surge can pretty much do the same thing. If it isn't too much trouble, you can try re-installing your OS and see if the network hiccups stop with a clean install.         

[captainspud]

When you say that the "rest" of the network is fine... do you mean to say that all the other computers connected to the network besides yours can access the internet with no problems, or is the random, intermittent network disconnection a problem shared by all the computers connected to the network?

My machine is the only one affected.

[BWPS]

try turning your computer off and back on.

[stumpy]

I am assuming, since there is a concern that the surge that killed the old router might have cooked a network card, that you have a wired connection to the router. Have you tried switching which port your PC is connected to with the router port used by one of the other computers? There could be an issue with the new router and (though you don't see a whole lot of this) it could be that a problem with one of the other PC's network cards is causing issues with your connection. You might check if you have the same issue when no other PC (or other device, like a print server, etc.) is connected to the router.

[randyripoff]

You've probably tried this already, but if you haven't...

Uninstall and remove the network card and drivers.  Reboot the computer.  Allow it to settle into the new configuration.  Then reinstall the network card, but not the drivers.  See if things work better then.  If you're still having problems, reinstall the drivers.  See if that fixes the problem.

You might also do (I'm sure you already have) replacing the ethernet cable and the nic card as well.

[Lunarman]

If you are on wireless, I have the same problem. Mine is infrequent however (knocks on wood) but I've just learned to live with it and assumed it was just a standard by-product of the imperfect technology known as wireless. :s