Could a laptop mess up an internet connection?

krooton

krooton

krooton

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Joined
9 May 2004
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Location
Leafy outskirts of London
I have a Netgear DG834G v3 with the latest firmware, on Be Broadband.

It usually has my pc connected via cable, and up to 2 more laptops connected wirelessly by my housemates.

Connection is stable 99% of the time in the above situation, but for some bizarre reason, whenever my gf connects with her laptop, the router's connection to the internet will drop randomly and we will all have to what for it to negotiate and reconnect.

This only ever happens if my gf's laptop is connected.

This obviously means it's her laptop, but I cannot figure out why.

I recently upgraded her Vista to Windows 7, but that hasn't made any difference, and I even tried turning off her wireless card and connected her laptop to the router via cable, but it still will kill the connection randomly.

Any ideas what could cause this?

I'm stumped :confused:
 
Could possibly be malware (or maybe even legit software) flooding the router with requests and causing it to drop? P2P software can be a culprit for this.

Maybe try installing some kind of monitoring software e.g. netlimiter or a firewall so you can see what processes are trying to access the internet.
 
Is it just the connection between the router and the internet that drops or all connection to the router?
 
Dist said:
Is it just the connection between the router and the internet that drops or all connection to the router?
Click to expand...

It's the router's connection, all connected devices are still connected to the router with no issues.

I've fully scanned her laptop with adaware, spybot and Kaspersky, so am pretty stumped :(
 
If your problem is malware related:

how about you install a free software firewall on her laptop and block all outgoing/incoming connections apart from the ones you specifically want, would be worth a go, if only to see what is trying to access the net?

other than that you could install wireshark on the laptop and monitor the wireless interface, but if youve not got a knowledge of networking it is unlikely you will be able to gain any meaningful information from that.
 
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