Alright so this problem has been going on for about the past 3-4 days now and it's really starting to irritate me. I'm having an issue where my connection seems to drop for a brief moment, which is not all that noticeable if you are only surfing the web or chatting on a messaging program. However, if you are playing a game the connection drops for just long enough to kick you out.

I'm really confused because this has not been happening until just recently, and the router is in the same spot as it always has been. My network card reads full signal strength to the router and if I run speedtest.net I receive 24mbps.

I tried doing a "ping google.com -t" in the cmd prompt and after letting it go for about 5 minutes I had a 5% packet loss. There were a handful of times that the connection timed out in the process.

Really, this whole thing is just aggrivating because whenever I try to download something or if I am playing a game I get dropped frequently (and completely randomly). Sometimes I can play for 30 minutes straight, and other times it will disconnect twice in 5 minutes.

If anyone has any advice I'd greatly appreciate it.

Does it also happen if you've got a wired connection?

You could also check if a neighbour has a network on the same or a similar frequency.

I'm going to assume that you've cycled your modem/router to no avail & verified w/ your ISP that the issue isn't w/ their service. You should check your event logs. You may also want to see if the problem persists w/ another device. If you don't have one borrow one.

At least in XP which I use, Windows' own Zero something or other service conflicts with my wifi adapter's software causing exactly the problem you described. Once I disable the Zero something or other (I think it may have been called Zero Configuration Utility) from the Windows Services menu, it works great.

Oh okay. Also, I forgot to mention that if you stop it, you are required to use the wireless adapter's specific connection utility.

Is the weather hotter than usual? I find that with crappy wireless routers (ie pretty much all of them) they tend to be less reliable in hot weather, I guess they overheat or something.

@Impi: I don't know if it happens if I use a wired connection but that's not really an option for my situation anyway.

@Mentat: Yeah I've been through the whole process of rebooting the modem and router several times with no positive results.

@Kroko/Mentat: I used to work at a tech support center and I know what you're referring to. I use Vista 64bit and by default the windows utility handles all the networking stuff, even if you install the software that comes with the network card. I doubt this is the problem, but I will try it anyway because I'm out of ideas.

@Detty: Hot as hell, welcome to a summer in Texas.

So apparently Vista doesn't use the wireless zero configuration. Instead it uses something called WLAN Autoconfig, which more or less is the same concept. Anyways, I disabled that and tried using just my adapter's software and that had no effect on the problem.

Currently I'm trying something else just for fun. I switched the card to another PCI slot on my mobo and I'm testing to see if that yields any results. Here's hoping...

[Edit] Didn't fix the problem. Ugh, I'm pretty much out of ideas.

****! I have failed you.

I know it was mentioned before, but I didn't see a response, do you have any other wireless (or wired) devices that are having the same problem or no problems at all?

I'm guessing it isn't all feasible to move the PC closer, connect with a wire, and just run a ping to google.com again, for 5-10 minutes to see the results?

Finally, does your router have any logs that you can look through to see if any connections are droppig or any errors that may be occurring?

I also didn't see it mentioned to try resetting the router to the factory defaults (after backing up your current configuration). That could also help/