Saturday 2 August 2014

Losing Wi-Fi connection after sleep

Problem:

I use a HP Probook Laptop at home running Windows 8.1 pro. I usually close the laptop whenever I take a short break so that I can resume my work where I left after the break. But, I find that upon opening the Laptop, the wifi does not connect and that too randomly. That means, it works fine on certain occasions and it doesn't on certain occasions. Some times, a restart helps connecting but not always. What could be the problem and how to get this resolved.

By: Lalith Venkateswaran

Solution:

This could be due to a combination of multiple issues relating to the configurations in your laptop and as well as on your router.

Upon closing the lid, the laptop goes to sleep mode and powers down the built in wifi device. Which might cause orphaned IPs at your router end and as you reconnect again and again, you might exhaust the DHCP range that your router is configured with. Check if this issue happens when you are on battery. If yes, then you may configure your power options so that your device does not get powered down, every time you close your laptop. You find this setting in the Power management tab of the wifi-adapter configuration. You may also review the advanced power settings for the wifi adaptor under the power options.

When your wifi connection fails upon wake up, you may check if you are able to connect to a different wifi network. If you don't have a different wifi network, you simply use the hotspot feature on your smartphone and try if your laptop can connect to it. If yes, then it is not just the wifi device on your laptop, it could be due to issues with your wifi router as well. Some routers may have issues in accepting connections from the same devices with the same mac id, as the previous connection might still be there. Try the following steps, which might solve your problem:


  • Try setting a shorter DHCP lease time, so that the orphaned connections get released sooner, so that your router has no problem in accepting a fresh connection.
  • Use the DHCP reservation, so that every time the laptop tries to establish a connection, the router assigns the same IP and thus no need for lease expiry / renewal.


Post a comment if this does not solve your problem.

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