My computer's phantom disconnecting internet

[DrKilljoy]

Hey guys, I have a technical question I haven't been able to get much help with, and was hoping someone here would be familiar with it or at least know a likely cause.

My laptop has, without a doubt, the most bizarre internet problem I've ever seen. For no apparent reason, it will just stop sending/receiving internet traffic. The computer says it has a good connection, but if I try to actually do anything, it acts as if it isn't connected. Probably the strangest part is that, if I've started loading a Youtube video and the connection "drops", the video will continue loading normally. All of these problems happen on networks where other computers work fine.

I can remedy the problem by resetting the connection, which I do by going into the command prompt and typing ipconfig /release followed by ipconfig /renew. The problem is that the disconnections are getting so infrequent that I have to reset the connection every few minutes.

My computer's a Toshiba Satellite A305 running Windows 7. I've had it for two years, and the problems started about eight months ago. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[Dan]

I had a similar problem some years ago. I never did work out exactly what was going on, but it was one particular application that was the cause. My best guess was that this application (a download manager) was not properly closing connections to web sites, resulting in the operating system running out of available sockets. Or ports. Or something.

Do you have any internet-aware software other than the usual browsers, email clients, etc? Particularly anything that downloads or uploads a large number of small files? If so, would it be worth trying some alternative software to do the same job?

[DrKilljoy]

Thanks for the response!

The only software like that I'm using right now is Steam, but as far as I know it hasn't caused problems like that for anybody else.

[Dan]

Ok... If re-establishing the connection to your router fixes the problem, maybe the problem is there, and not the PC? I'm not sure what kind of LAN configuration issues might cause your problems, but it could be worth a look.

[alexiel]

I'm actually having a similar problem myself. Since about a week ago, my internet connection keeps getting disrupted about every 15 minutes or so. It's not enough to cause a problem if I'm jut reading forums or watching hulu, but if I'm playing Battlefield on-line or doing anything else that requires a constant server connection, I end up losing my connection every time. No changes have been made to my network or settings. It just decided that it wasn't going to function correctly anymore.

At the moment I'm scanning my hard drive for any kind of viruses or malware that might be the culprit, but barring that I can't think of what it may be. I did have this problem several months ago, which seemed to have been remedied when I rebuilt my computer (which included completely reinstalling my OS) so I'm hoping that it's some minor bug that's causing the issue.