Approximately a month ago I started experiencing a minor, but frustrating problem: my internet connection would drop for several seconds every two hours.

My quick investigation showed that these drops occur exactly when my IP lease ends, with 100% consistency. No attempts to fix this helped: my PC just can't reach the DHCP server for renewal, when the lease becomes 1 hour old. I tried all kinds of ipconfig tricks, including flushing DNS cache and releasing the lease, tried installing latest Intel drivers (I have I217-V), tried disabling/enabling all possibly related and unrelated options, to no avail. My computer is connected to the optic fiber transceiver supplied by my provider, so there's no way to alter the lease time (which would kind of fix my problem, if I had it set to 24 hours). I've contacted them, and they said that they haven't changed anything since 2013.

One could say "big deal, your Windows broke, just reinstall or something". The thing is, I have two independent Windows 8.1 installations on the same machine: one installation is relatively old (installed it before the problem started), the other one is two weeks old. Both drop connections.

I haven't tried using a different PC yet (will do that later today), but until then: what could possibly be the reason for this? Can this be a hardware issue (maybe corrupted memory on my card)? Or maybe some setting is synchronized between my Windows installations, and that's why they have the same symptoms? Any related experience/suggestions/requests for more info are welcome.

Approximately a month ago I started experiencing a minor, but frustrating problem: my internet connection would drop for several seconds every two hours.

My quick investigation showed that these drops occur exactly when my IP lease ends, with 100% consistency. No attempts to fix this helped: my PC just can't reach the DHCP server for renewal, when the lease becomes 1 hour old. I tried all kinds of ipconfig tricks, including flushing DNS cache and releasing the lease, tried installing latest Intel drivers (I have I217-V), tried disabling/enabling all possibly related and unrelated options, to no avail. My computer is connected to the optic fiber transceiver supplied by my provider, so there's no way to alter the lease time (which would kind of fix my problem, if I had it set to 24 hours). I've contacted them, and they said that they haven't changed anything since 2013.

One could say "big deal, your Windows broke, just reinstall or something". The thing is, I have two independent Windows 8.1 installations on the same machine: one installation is relatively old (installed it before the problem started), the other one is two weeks old. Both drop connections.

What could possibly be the reason for this? Can this be a hardware issue (maybe corrupted memory on my card)? Or maybe some setting is synchronized between my Windows installations, and that's why they have the same symptoms? Any related experience/suggestions/requests for more info are welcome.

UPD: I've connected my laptop, with Windows 8.1 as well, and it does NOT experience this problem. Halfway through the lease time, it successfully refreshed the lease, and extended it for whopping 8 hours. Have no idea what's wrong with my workstation.