User:Chris Beazell/My Network Card Commits Suicide

Recently, my network card has been acting up. I don't know what the cause of it is, and I don't know the real solution. Here's the symptoms, anyone with expertise who can comment please make use of the talk page to do so.

The first time it happened, in the middle of a session, my (windows) computer just randomly decided that it had no more use for an IP address. I wasn't fooling around with the settings or being stupid with ipconfig /release or anything like that. Just in the middle of a few downloads and talking on IRC, it dies. I spent the next eight days trying to figure out how to fix it, changing everything I could think of fairly methodically and rebooting to see if that would help. Eventually I got it back up by pinging its old IP from my laptop.

Note: I have since learned that this was likely not the thing that fixed it, and rightfully so, if a computer has no IP how can it respond to ping?

When trying to renew my IP address while affected by this problem, I get one of two error messages:

Since then it's happened twice, both times after rebooting my computer. While the steps below are a black magic fix for it, I would like to know what the real problem and solution are.


 * 1) Open Control Panel.
 * 2) Open Network Connections.
 * 3) Get the properties on the connection.
 * 4) Change the TCP/IP settings to use a static IP address and the correct subnet mask/gateway/dns server.
 * 5) Confirm the changes.
 * 6) Go back into the settings and change them back to "obtain automatically".
 * 7) Confirm the changes.

After performing the above steps, my network connection pops back up. Any clues?

Update
Well, it seems as though it's DHCP related, because if I configure my computer to use a static IP address, everything works fine. Luckily I'm behind a NAT and can afford to do this.