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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.

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  • Have you installed any software which could play with network settings? (such as network monitors, tools)
    – Jet
    Commented May 29, 2014 at 11:40
  • No, nothing of that sort. My second installation was completely fresh, when the problem started occurring (had installed just Chrome, git, ConEmu, that's it).
    – Alec Mev
    Commented May 29, 2014 at 11:44

1 Answer 1

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If you're the only user on your Fiber Transceiver, you could write down what the values windows is obtaining for IP address, DNS, gateway, etc... then hard code windows with an identical static IP. Do this for each computer.

Windows seems to have a (known to me!) glitch in which when the DHCP lease expires, Windows EXPIRES it, shutting down connection, rather than keeping it alive but asking for another.

This 'blip' causes hiccups in network connectivity frequently with windows systems. Notoriously, if a router serves DHCP records with 'unlimited' time (signaled as 0xFFFFFFFF in the expiration time), windows hiccups since it views the value as a signed integer, implying that the expiration time is -1 seconds from now (whoops! already expired, ask again!). Grr.

  • A better solution would be to install your OWN router on the Fiber Transceiver, let that serve the DHCP records, which you could control. The router shouldn't have any issues with whatever the Fiber is serving.
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  • Thanks for the answer. Buying a 1 Gbit router will be my last resort. And looks like this isn't a Windows-related problem: check the update.
    – Alec Mev
    Commented May 30, 2014 at 6:26
  • Weird. But good to see things working well with other machine. Best of luck.
    – lornix
    Commented May 30, 2014 at 6:32

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