Windows 7 repeatedly disconnects from only one specific router

Question

I have the Broadcom 4352 Wireless NIC.

Very very often my Windows 7 laptop will lose internet connection but still be connected to the router. (Says router has no internet connection).Other devices on the network appear to maintain internet access.

Many times I will lose internet and I will disconnect from the router and reconnect and only get wifi for a few seconds before I lose internet again.

I have read a lot of Q/A on the internet already about problems like this but many of them result in a change on the Windows 7 computer. But I am SURE that it is not the laptop because it works flawlessly without disconnecting on every other router that I've attempted to connect to.

I have checked multiple times and my Broadcom driver is the newest version.

So my questions are:

• Why does the router work with every device except my laptop?

• Why does my laptop work with every router except mine?

• How do I fix it?

I'm happy to provide any additional information that people need to help me troubleshoot this problem.

Answer 1

I've seen this problem with a number of routers that proxy DNS lookups. If you go to a command prompt and run ipconfig /all , you should get a list of your current DNS servers. If you see a private IP address such as 192.168.something.something, chances are your router is not passing your requests out to the Internet properly.

The solution to this problem is to tell your computer to use specific public DNS servers, and not rely on your router to be your DNS server. I suggest trying Google's public DNS servers and seeing if that solves your problem.

1. Go to the Start Menu and click Control Panel
2. In the Windows Control Panel, under Network and Internet, click View network status and tasks.
3. Click the link next to Connections on the right. In this screenshot we're using a wired connection so the link is called Local Area Connection. If you're using Wireless the link will be named differently.
4. You'll see a connection status window, click Properties.
5. Select the Internet Protocol Version 4 (TCP/IPv4) item, and click the Properties button.
6. Select Use the following DNS server addresses, and enter the following addresses:

Preferred DNS: 8.8.8.8 Alternate DNS: 8.8.4.4

7.Finally click the OK in this and the previous windows to save your changes.

Answer 2

If you somehow put aside all software issues, there are many causes for this behaviour at the hardware level, some of the ones I've had experienced are:

1. Incompatibility. You can set your AP to transmit using an older technology, like b/g or even only b or g, instead of n.
2. Power of the transmission, sometimes a too loud tranmission causes too much noise on certain NICs.
3. Disable WPA/WPA2 and use only one (WPA2 is preferred). The autentication frames may be messed up (this is more software related).
4. Disable other features like WPS.

You may also want to update your AP's firmware/OS.