Laptop Internet Connection Loss

[Alec_27]

My laptop is connected to the internet for about 2 hours then randomly disconnects, even though it still says its connected. A quick fix to this is disconnecting and reconnecting but then it will go out in another hour. any suggestions?

 

[Solandri]

Check your router for a setting called DHCP lease time. Set it to a more reasonable length, like 24 hours or 730 hours (1 month). A multiple of 24 hours is usually best as you can then time it so the disconnect happens while you are asleep.

If your router doesn't have that setting, you can try assigning your laptop a DHCP static IP on the router. Or see if your router will accept 3rd party firmware like DD-WRT which has this function.

The purpose of this timeout is so your router does not run out of IP addresses. If it can hand out a max of 254 IP addresses, and each one it hands out is good for a month, and more than 254 unique devices connect in a month, it will run out of IP addresses.. The lease time tells the router how long to hold an IP address for a device, after which the lease is rescinded and the IP address returned to the available pool. 1-2 hours is just silly though.