Network Connectivity Problem

[Obtruse_Man4]

My friend has a internet connectivity problem, and I think it might have something to do with DHCP. He has a cable modem hooked up to this wireless router: WRT54G, and there're two computers hooked up to the router. Both computers are running windows xp home. The connection problem happens almost every week, sometimes he can't even connect to the router itself. The only solution is resetting both the modem and the router, but sometimes even this doesn't work every time. What's the cause of this? Are the computers losing their IP address and that's the reason for the need to reset the modem and router? Thanks for the help.

[Tifosi]

is there a firmware out for either the router or network adapters that corrects this?

[Obtruse_Man4]

Don't know, but thanks I didn't think of that. I'll check up on that.

[Obtruse_Man4]

Didn't work, anyone else know what's wrong?

[scottyman]

question - are both machines using wireless? or are they hardwired?

if they're wireless, most likely it's a problem with zero configuration tool for wireless -
most of those faults are fixed in sp2 (in fact - all our problems went away with that too!)
But once the users are up and running, the service can be disabled.

if they're hardwired - that's unusual, as there's nothing much that can go wrong.

in either case, it's worth assigning static ip addresses to the client machines.

[Obtruse_Man4]

Yes they're hardwired, but I didn't think of static ip's. I'll try that, hopefully it'll work.

cheers

[bsodmike]

Maybe the router is renewing the DHCP leases but for some odd reason taking it's time - i.e. both XP boxes for a while are not on the same subnet as the router?

Hrm....

[scottyman]

unlikely - else they wouldn't be connecting at all - afaik soho linksys boxes don't support multiple ranges or vlans.
it IS highly unusual regardless -
had a similar, but wireless related problem with my Dad - where his new printer was wireless in peer mode which kept causing his laptop to drop it's connection - despite the fact that it was set to node only!