Hello people,

This week we've had a power failure arround the entire neighbourhood. Altrough the power was restored after a few hours my computer has a big problem now, basicly, if I let it inactive for too long (and sometimes randomly) the router disconnects my PC. When I try to reconnect to the network after that I get an error message saying something like my PC cant get a network adress assigned. After reconnecting / disconnecting the network cables and reinstalling the drivers from my network card it usually starts working again, for a few while. Now I'm afraid to leave my computer behind because I'm affraid it won't be able to connect to the network tommorow, which means I will have no internet (the router manages the internet connection). Connected to the router is another wireless router, which works fine, altrough it disconnected for a while yesterday as well but today it has been working fine.

Can anyone help me fixing this irritating problem?

Can you tell us what router do you have? Are you using a hardware router, or it's just another PC, with router software installed?

Basicaly, it appears to me, thah the problem lies with network card, maybe it got a power surge when the power got back, and it got fried... Or maybe something like that...

Or, if you have DHCP server installed with router, maybe when you changed settings, you haven't saved the changes, and so, when power was out, it all reset back to defaults?

These are just a few answers that I can think of right now.... I guess others will have more ideas...

Try mailing/contacting support department of your router manufacturer.

They should DEFINETELY know what happened...or else.

It's an E-TECH ADSL 2/2+ router, DHCP enabled, I checked with the settings and they should be fine..

Well I guess it fixed itself someway seeing I don;t have any problems at all anymore, call it unreliable hardware any day.

If you are connection a router to another router , you have to configure the 2nd in bridge mode .
Witch means you are just it as access point, if both have DHCP enabled in the same networksegment you may have some problems with getting an IP adres.

If your network is not that big (when I say big, I mean big like several hundred or thousands of hosts), you may do away with DHCP and just assign static IP addresses throughout your network. Basically, you disable DHCP and correctly configure each host with the correct IP address, subnet mask, and default gateway. However, if you're not really comfortable doing these things then just let DHCP do its thing.

my thought is that either there been a fuse blow or just malfunction

Before my PC Router I was using an Edimax Router hardware. It was good and fast but one thing I realized is that power failure usually corrupts its settings and made it act weird. Slow connection, some units can't get IP's etc... I tried resetting (through its reset button) and it worked fine after. Using hardware router 24/7 sometimes corrupts the settings as well, maybe because of the heat, so I discarded it and used a PC for my routing needs.

So try resetting your router, upgrade the firmware (which is crucial and dangerous). Try reinstalling your Ethernet Card driver and delete the 'winsock' and 'winsock2' entry in the registry cause sometimes it gets corrupted because of power failure.