Windows 7 losing connection to network but not internet

Question

My windows 7 will lose connection to my work network every 4 - 6 seconds (it varies). It happens whether I'm connected through Ethernet or wireless. The weird thing is that it does stay connected to the internet which goes through the same server. When I run a repeated ping test, I can see it time out on the ethernet or wireless connection every 4-6 seconds but when i set it to ping google for example there is no timeout. Any clues anyone. I have set our server to provide my machine with a static IP, updated the NIC driver (even though this is working fine because internet traffic is not affected) and tried to troubleshoot the connection but it comes up with a clean bill of health.

Does anyone have any clues. It makes my machine almost unusable as all my database programs like MS Access stop working if they refer to a database periodically that they cant access. The fact that internet traffic is not affected rules out a whole host of stuff like auto-negotiation, NIC power saving, etc.. Our IT guys are at a loss and want to re-install my machine.

Answer 1

Is only your machine affected?

Have you tried/or can you try a different Switch/Router?

HTTP/WWW protocols allow for packet loss/dropped connections and are made to be resilient.

The majority of networking protocols allow for minor loss/dropped connections but you will experience problems - problems very similar to yours.

Auto-negotiation is related to speed, not quality of connection. NIC power saving will only come into effect if the connection/machine is inactive.

An easier thing to try (before a reinstall) would be a different LAN card, then (my next step) would be a livecd/fresh install on a different HDD to see if the issue is hardware related (or the OS/drivers).

Answer 2

We have about 24 client machines which do not have this problem. I have since found out a bit more, internet traffic on my machine goes straight to the gateway on our router, whereas network traffic (obviously) goes to our file (domain) server. The domain server does get used for DNS lookup by my machine. This is probably why there is sometimes a 4-5 second delay before webpages are found.