Hi, I did some searches and there are lots of people having connection issues but I couldn't find exactly what I'm experiencing. We have a (Dell) notebook with a AirLink+ USB wireless device and a no-name desktop with an AirLink wireless card. They both connect to a Linksys router which is now connected to an SBC/Yahoo DSL modem. We switched about a week ago from another DSL provider where things were working fine then (but the costs were much higher).
The desktop has only been used the last few days and it seems ok. But for the last week, I've been trying to use the notebook but it seems to lose internet connectivity every few minutes. At first, I was doing an ipconfig /release and /renew which worked most of the time (but it seems to be dropping down to only half the time). Then I noticed that I could always get to my router and if I used their utilities to do a traceroute to something like Yahoo, that would pretty much always work and then everything else would (usually) start working again after that (ping would sometimes work in this situation but never from the cmd line, only occassionally from the router utilities page).
I'm not sure how to fix this. We're both running XP, using wireless, to the same router but the notebook keeps losing the connection. One difference is that I installed the SBC/Yahoo programs from their CD on the notebook and then disabled them from 'net access using ZoneAlarm when I found out they send info to SBC. The one time I let them run, it didn't seem to drop the connection (but it also doesn't (usually) drop it as long as I'm actively using it without breaks). I'll likely just uninstall those at some point.
So is this related to firewall settings, dhcp, dynamic IPs, MTU, something else? I have line filters everywhere and I've scanned my machine for malware multiple times (with several programs) in the last week.
Thanks for any suggestions!