losing internet access randomly - RTM x64

Hi all,

Having an odd problem which has only started happening with the RTM build. Let me describe the symptoms.

Every 5-15 minutes i seem to loose internet access. However, if i have an open connection, in this case a remote desktop connection, it remains working just fine. But if i try to pull up any web page, no luck. If i wait a few minutes it seems to clear itself, but then will happen again at some random time. I can just be browsing web pages for this to happen. When this happens the only web page i can pull up is my routers confirguation web interface (http://192.168.0.1). If i want to clear the error myself, i go to the network connections and disable and re-enable the connection, at which point it'll work for a little while and happen again.

I'm using my mobo's onboard NIC. Mobo is asus P5K-SE. NIC is an atheros chip. My internet connection itself is working fine since another pc running win7 (also RTM but different NIC and x86) has no problems at all.

Seen a few other posts from people for something similar. One posts suggests turning off the windows power management option of the nic. I tried doing that (although i dont remember if i rebooted after changing the setting) and it had no effect. Plus i want that option enabled since i use Wake On Lan to remotely power my pc.

I'm picking up a pci nic later today and I'm going to drop that in there to see if it'll work with that. If anyone has any other suggestions, i'm all ears.

How strange... I had this happen to me a couple of times and I have an Asus P5K too. I just restarted my PC and it sprung back to life. Perhaps it's just a driver update issue, but I've not seen a newer one than I already have.

Nex time this happens I will do some more troubleshooting and see if I can see what is at fault..

edit: Just checking, is your driver named "Atheros L1 Gigabit Ethernet 10/100/1000Base-T" with driver date 24/04/09 - that's the one I have at the moment.

small world that we have the same mobo

actually, my driver is slightly newer. Its dated 6/22/2009 and the version is 2.4.7.27
I did try rolling back the driver to a previous version at one point (although i think it rolled back to one from 2008) and it did not help.

Now oddly, last night i have no problems. i was even able to stream an entire episode of lost to my PS3 without the network dying. Previously, streaming video was a sure way of killing it. at around 13-15% it would die. Last night it worked perfectly.

Right now i can only think of two possible reasons for that.

1. I picked up a cheap dlink nic, disabled the onboard nic but then had to reinstall the onboard since the dlink didnt even have vista drivers, let alone x64 drivers. Maybe uninstalling the atheros from device manager AND disabling it the bios and then adding it all back in did something?

2. maybe it works fine after a reboot and then fails when the system has resumed from sleep?

I've ordered a dynex nic meanwhile from bestbuy since i found a post online from someone saying this nic works fine in win7 x64

Mine is version 2.4.7.22, but it sounds like yours cuts out much more often than mine did. I'll keep a note of if/when it next happens, and pay attention to if my PC was in sleep mode beforehand.

yeah two days back it was literally dropping every 5-15 minutes. My guess is that maybe it had something to do with the amount of data sent, since as i mentioned it would also drop while streaming an episode of lost and always at around the 13 to 15% mark. Maybe after 5-15 minutes of web browsing i had hit whatever the mark is and triggered the failure.