Internet Going to Local Only Randomly

Problem Desktop has wireless card for Wi-Fi internet. Router is in room adjacent to the room with the desktop. The computer will stay online for several hours, sometimes days at a time -- but sometimes the connection goes to Local Only. All I have to do is disconnect and reconnect and it works perfectly fine -- so my question is - what is causing my connection to drop to Local Only? Or, if no one knows off hand, is there an application I can use to log the transactions of my computer talking to the router?

your router should have logs i think right?

Could just be a crappy router?

It is not the router -- same one I have used before I had Vista and never dropped. Problem seems to be with Vista itself -- there are hundreds of people with a similar problem. There are ways to fix it -- from typing things into the Run command to downloading different (XP) drivers. So I am going to give them a go and see if any of them work.

[quote897de21e29="TryinToGetPaid"]It is not the router -- same one I have used before I had Vista and never dropped. Problem seems to be with Vista itself -- there are hundreds of people with a similar problem. There are ways to fix it -- from typing things into the Run command to downloading different (XP) drivers. So I am going to give them a go and see if any of them work.[/quote897de21e29]

Good luck )

It's not all that uncommon for wireless connections to drop. I've had it happen with XP quite often, but haven't noticed it with Vista yet (albeit I've used Vista only a fraction of the time I've used XP, but I do have Vista running on two PC's atm). However, in most cases it should re-establish the connection automatically, and should be mostly invisible to things like web surfing. You might get an occasional 404 or timeout, but it's often unnoticeable. However anything with a static or stateful connection like FTP, SSH, VPN, etc. will usually be interrupted and must be restarted.

Aside from faulty hardware (routers & nics) or drivers, probably the most common cause of dropped wifi connections is interference on the 2.4Ghz spectrum. Microwave ovens, 2.4Ghz cordless phones, and active Bluetooth devices are the most common culprits. Have you tried changing the channel on the router?

No I have not DMorris - and I will do that now. It does not reconnect automatically, though. And it when it does happen the PC can not do anything on the internet at all, until I manually reconnect.

Edit The Only channel I can choose from is 6?

EditEdit Turning off Turbo allows other channels -- is there one I should choose over the others?

No, there is nothing special about any given channel. Each channel uses a slightly different frequency in the 2.4Ghz band. Moving to a frequency further away from the offending frequencies will usually result in a more reliable connection. It just takes some trial and error.