computors off line?

Question

My wife has a computor & I do also in our home. We stay off line more than on line. The cable box lights will all be on and we are also using a router because of the second computor. When we go off line the cable box is still lite up and the router is flashing. when I un plug the router power supply an plug it back up, we are on line again. It seems like I have to do this more and more. Do you think our router is bad.The router is not wireless. ** Thanks **

Answer 1

What does the configuration screen of your router say?

If you have DSL this is effectively a very fast dial-up. The router may drop the connection after a certain amount of inactivity. It might be having problem re-connecting.

Type in the IP address (192.168.xxx.1 The xxx will depend on your router) of the router into your browser URL and it should tell you it's status.

Answer 2

It could be however there are other possibilities too. Like the person stated above it could be an inactivity thing. Some high speed internet companies will sort of shut of the signal after a while of inactivity, it could be hours, days, really whatever they want it to be. To see if this is the case contact them and see if they have it set to have to be redialed or reconnected if it has been inactive. If this is the case you will most likely be able to solve this by changing a setting in the routers configuration page. Your router company or phone company should be able to guide you through the steps to make the right settings. (I would be able to but I don't know your router brand and model and everyone is very different).

Another possibility is that it is your router. I had a problem similar to this with our Belkin router, it would kick every signal wireless computer off of the internet unless you restarted it. I replaced it with a Linksys and now everything works great. This could especially be the case if these problems just recently started happening.

Most likely though this is just a settings problem. If you call the manufacturer of your router they should be able to tell you any of the settings you need to change or even if it is broken and then they might fix it for you. I have had experience withe the brands Belkin and Linksys however there are many more. From my experience, Belkin's customer support really sucks, be prepared to stay on hold and not resolve the problem if you have them. Linksys was extremely helpful, told me the problem right away and told me step by step how to fix it. If you decide to go with a new router, I recommend getting a Linksys router.

Hope this helps!!

P.S. if you don't like any of these answers, you might get better results by posting this question under Networking and Internet instead of under Monitors.