hey dudes, My windows xp pc keeps dropping my internet connection after a few hours. I haven't been able to determine whether it is when idle or not yet but every time its happened there was no activity. I'm xp pro on an cable modem connection with no router connected. When i lose the connection i am still pulling a valid IP address from the IP config. IP renews will not renew the ip and the only way it appears to re-establish the connection is rebooting Checked all internet settings and all appeared to be set correctly. Just ran virus scans and spyware scans and everythings fonzie. One thing i did do was adjust some of my services but i went back and changed all those settings back. I also deleted the contents of Pre-fetch folder and temp files. Any ideas before i call my ISP?

Well, it may not hurt to call your ISP, but, depending on which company you're using, they don't always have a clue, or are deliberately secretive about what causes the "droppings." I'd like to know what you learn, because I believe that the ISP's will terminate a connection after so many hours of inactivity and rebooting is the standard way to get the connection reactivated. The beauty of the high sierra And she’s looking out for you

Most likely the techies were stealing your bandwidth to frag each other in games.

Dr.Z you are correct. My ISP will terminate after a length of inactivity. I have XP Pro FB and am cable connected as well.

Hey Fat Boy, We were having the same problems as you have been since last Friday, March 4th. It is only on our XP boxes. 2K works fine. We did the same testing you did to all of the same effect, nada but yesterday I checked our DNS and WINs settings on my PC and they were blank. I am getting a dynamic IP. I didn't think of checking that earlier because I create the images for one division here but where I sit is in another division whose images are controlled by a different group. The division who uses my images have not been having this problem. I have the DNS and WINs IPs set in my images. Now you are on a home PC? I have DSL at home and I have two DNS IP's. My home PC has been fine and I run XP Pro w/SP2. I would check the TCP/IP settings on your NIC and see if any DNS IPs are listed and if not contact your ISP to fine out what they are. Without knowing where the DNS is your PC won't be able to resolve names to IP addresses. I suspect that when rebooting and it first establishes a connection to your ISP that it knows where that is until it times out. Once it times out then the PC has no idea where to refind the DNS. That may or may not be what happens technically but it makes sense.