Windoze 10, laptops dropping WiFi connections

[Jimk]

We have a couple of Lenovo laptops running win10 mostly used by my sons to do school work, gaming & occasionally by me!

Annoyingly they both regularly but intermittently drop their connection to the house wifi, then reconnect. Then "some time" later they do it again, sometines it's minutes sometimes it's hours, so I'm pretty sure it's not the router lease expiring & renewing

The house WiFi is a Plusnet hub one with both 2.4 & 5ghz WiFi networks (different SSIDs), I wondered if they were chopping & changing networks bit I told one m/c to forget the 5ghz network, & it still drops the 2.4ghz connection... Grrrr...

any pointers where to start?

[Jimk]

WiFi analyser reports just our WiFi networks...

[Jimk]

Oh & the old Wii that's on & off all day whilst in "standby" - powered but "off" yellow power light....

[Jimk]

we do have a microwave but from the timings it's not usually on when it happens...

[Jimk]

I don't believe they do it at the same time but I'll try to find out. Lots of other things connected & staying connected... No other sources of interference that I can think of..

We have an aging Wii that (looking in the router logs) does a similar thing....

[Jimk]

No it's upstairs & so is the receiver... I should point out that other devices on the WiFi appear to stay attached "all day"... Just these laptops have episodes of dropping & reconnecting....

[Richard]

Check the wifi clutter. Try inssider

see if your channel is being swamped by other signals

[Richard]

You're lucky! In addition to ours, there are one TalkTalk, one Plusnet and Virgins :(

[Paul Herber]

Do they both drop out and reconnect at the same time? Any other devices that connect e.g. phone or tablet? Any sources of interference e.g. heating contols, utility usage meters?

[Paul]

Device Manager : (Wifi item) : Properties : Power Management

"Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power"

You could try unticking that and see what happens.

I don't have any Wifi here, so haven't tested stuff like that. None of the routers were Wifi routers.

Paul

[Tim+]

Got a wireless thermostat anywhere near the router? My mother?s one would regularly cause a drop in the Wi-Fi connection until we moved the router further away.

Tim

[charles]

our microwave oven seems to cause short term dropouts on wifi

[bilou]

USB3 is known to create interference with 2.4GHz WIFI.

[Martin Brown]

What chipset are the laptops using? There are a handful of different chipsets about and certain combos don't always play ball reliably. Mostly I have seen iP*ds being tetchy about what they will connect to.

One option to see if it is Win10 specific is boot the laptop from a live Linux distro and see if the network connection is stable. I once proved my laptop mouse and keyboard had an intermittent fault this way. It looked for all the world like a driver fault in Windows but once it was clear that Linux had exactly the same problem it had to be hardware.

Always worth cycling the power on the router before you do anything else. Sometimes they do get into very strange states. My repeater does it about every two or three months. Devices can see it and connect but get no usable network traffic - cycling the power resolves it. The wired pass through connections continue to work so it is a Wifi specific bug.

The most common cause of dropping a connection is poor Wifi signal.

[Brian Gaff (Sofa]

Interference due to so many people having wifi. I get this with amazon echos. If the laptops have network sockets try to connect via direct connections, its far more reliable in my experience. I'd have thought the higher band would be less congested locally since it is affected more by walls, so fewer interfering routers. Brian

[Brian Gaff (Sofa]

Are there any of those pesky power internet adaptors in use anywhere near, they notoriously create hash from DC to light, well not quite but they are not exactly clean, neither are many power supplies for domestic gear either. The problem I see seems to start on the back channel, from computer to hub or phone to hub and then of course it tries to negotiate a new connection. Not sure why this occurs, but maybe something just momentarily swamps the signal and is enough to lose lock. It is a really hard thing to diagnose. Which is why as much as possible here uses cables. Brian

[Brian Gaff (Sofa]

I managed to make an amazon echo dot lose its connection when my Iphone started to download a lot of email. Nobody really knows the secret underbelly of these things in detail. Brian

[Brian Gaff (Sofa]

That in theory at least should not happen unless you run a very long us b cable or have a very badly designed pc! Brian

[charles]

but more likely to drop out if you move from room to room.

[Martin Brown]

Wifi works perfectly well enough most of the time. The only things I have connected on wired ethernet are using insanely high bandwidth to move large files about. Web browsing and the like it handles with ease.

I reckon routers run out of handles after a month or two on continuously. Not really a problem for me since we usually have powercuts often enough to reset it before it hits any such limits.

The signal may also be weaker inside the home. Some of my internal (used to be external) before the kitchen extension are 3' thick. That sheer bulk stops most wireless signals which is why I have a wired repeater.

It is worth surveying your site for any interfering sources and choosing the cleanest channel. Time was when every BT user sat on channel 11.