Wifi Drops on new laptop introduced to home network
mdipierro
Newbie

All, long time reader, first time poster.  I have been a fios customer for years and have learned my way around the ways and means of mainting the router and laptops.  I recently introduced a new laptop (windows 7) to the house.  It worked fine for about a day or two then the wifi network kept dropping.  I did the ipconfig and it it would show an ip addresss as it was trying to reconnect but then when it had no connection, no ip address existed (Note, this laptop works on my work wifi and hotel wifi's with no issue.  It only seems to be a problem with my home fios router (Verizon MI424WRI Router).  It is fairly new as well, probaly 2 months.

When I log onto the router and go under the IP address distribution it shows the IP address as expired.  I called tech support and they noted something on the laptop was blocking the device.  I unstalled McaFee and no dice it kept dropping the wifi connection. 

Next I reloaded the OS and it worked for a day or so then the same issue reared its ugly head again.  Today, the only thing i noticed was I turned on the wifi of my phone (note, when this issue started happening when the machine was first introduced to the house about 4 weeks ago i thought i noticed the same pattern - new kid comes in the house, activates itouch and my laptop loses wifi)

the only think of note i see in the event viewer is "Your computer was not assigned an address from the network (by the DHCP Server) for the Network Card with network address 0xD4BED960A4A4.  The following error occurred: 0x79. Your computer will continue to try and obtain an address on its own from the network address (DHCP) server."  This occurs a few minutes before the wifi is dropped but am not sure the two can be related.

Verizon support keeps saying its the machine.  I did restart the router MANY times (disconnect coax and power cable) and boot up the laptop in safe mode with netwokring and the issue still occurs so I am struggling with the issue.  Interestingly enough the one thing it did try was to boot the machine with a USB on Ubuntu and the wireless works fine (tested for a few hours and no drops).  I then booted the machine back up in windows and the same issue occurs.

Chicken or the Egg: 

Chicken:  Is the IP address on the verizon router keep expiring (same address is assigned everytime (192.168.1.9)

and causes laptop to drop and not reconnect to laptop

Egg:  Something on the machine causes the disconnect and then causes the P address on the verizon router keep expiring. 

Egg 2:  Does a new device getting introduced into the home wifi causes my laptop to stop working?

Mcafee is no longer running.  Uninstalled Windows Defender.  Booted in Safe Mode with Networking.  None of the above works.  Hard wiring does, but not wifi.

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Re: Wifi Drops on new laptop introduced to home network
smith6612
Community Leader
Community Leader

Since it seems to work fine in Linux and not in Windows, I would start considering some deeper OS-running services that could be causing issues. For example, the drivers being used for the WLAN card could be causing some grief. Settings such as Roaming Tendency, "Fat Channel Intolerance" and Frequency Width can cause association issues. On that topic, outdated drivers, especially with the newer Wireless N chipsets can cause some problems too. When you update the network driver, I would suggest getting it from the chipset maker's website. For example, if it's Intel, get it from Intel's driver website rather than the computer maker's website, which may list old drivers for your model.

Also, see if disabling IPv6 and HomeGroups in Windows helps any. Windows comes default with IPv6 on which could be causing issues due to the way it has to establish link-local addresses. I've not heard of this causing too many issues with the FiOS routers but in the past it did with the Gen1 series on old firmware. Linux often has IPv6 disabled by default, depending on the distribution of course. In Ubuntu, it is shut off by default.

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