As of recent I have been experiencing frequent network outages. Specifically my network adaptor (an Intel Pro/1000 integrated network device on an Intel 955XBK motherboard) reports it has “Limited Connectivity”. My operating system is a fully updated version of Windows Vista Ultimate.
There are 4 other computers on the network (all of which are XP Professional SP2) which do not suffer from any ill effects. They are all hooked to the same network, with a Window 2003 server providing the DHCP services.
The outages occur sporadically and are usually preceded by a brief pause or “hiccup” in my systems performance. The only way to recover network access is to either disable/enable the device or to reboot. Release and renews as well as starting and stopping the DHCP service have no effect. This problem has only appeared since upgrading to Vista.
I had experienced the same problem before but had to reinstall the operating system due to hard disk failure and have been free of the issue for several weeks now.
I have tried the following steps to no avail;
-Updating and reinstalling the drivers.
-Disabling IP6, QoS packet scheduler, Mapper I/O Driver, Dicovery responder on the card.
-Having UAC turned both on and off.
-Disabled Auto Tuning.
-Removing Remote Differential Compression,
-Updating the BIOS on the motherboard.
-Installing hotfix 931770
As stated above this is a clean install of Vista to a new hard disk and the problem has only recently re-manifested (as of this weekend). Again there is no apparent rhyme or reason to the outages, they can occur when the system is complete idle or while I’m loading web pages.
The only programs running in the background that I am aware of are Symantec Corporate 10.2 and AIM Lite.