new notebook- wireless problems

I've got a new medion 10" notebook thingy. Basically the prob is- at irregular intervals (ie could be after a couple of mins, could be a lot longer) webpages etc will not load etc... but the taskbar icon etc is still telling you its connected as before. Usually I just turn off the wireless and turn it back on again (ie standard IT procedure!) and it works again. But still annoying obviously... what you think- hardware or software problem... something to do with firewall?? any ideas?

Cheers

Try pinging the router from the notebook, while also pinging it from another (working) machine. Say your router IP address was 192.168.0.1, you'd go to a command prompt and type

ping -t 192.168.0.1 (on Windows) or

ping 192.168.0.1 (on Linux)

leave it for a couple of minutes and look out for pings that go missing (i.e. you get a "request timed out" message or similar). If you get lost pings on both machines, it's the router, if it's just the netbook then it's a fault with that machine.

I've had to turn the power management off on a couple of laptops to avoid this kind of packet loss, so this might be somthing to check.

Check your event logs (R.c My Computer, Manage, Event Logs)

thanks (belatedly) for the suggestions; I run another laptop from the same router and that never has this problem so that suggests its something to do with this one. Events log- I’ve had a look (though not sure really what I’m looking for...) and in the 'event viewer' under 'system' there are errors listed which *might* on first glance correspond to the occurrences of the problem- the most regular of these lists 'W32Time' as the source.

So- I googled this and some random message board suggests turning off 'internet time synchronisation'- which I’ll do and see what happens- ring any bells ??

hmmmmm, seem to recall some DNS errors tying up with W32Time problems.

the fix escapes me! I'll have a google tomorrow, but its bed time now

Probably worth changing the channel that your wireless router broadcasts on, intermitant drop outs could be caused by other routers broadcasting on the same channel.