CrazyTB's blog

Since this laptop is powerful enough for basically all games available today (and also those available in short future), I use it as my game machine too.

Previously, my desktop was not too powerful, and in addition I didn't restart it so often, so there was no use for Windows there. In addition, I started to run Apache web server on my desktop, which means that I shouldn't turn it off, else my site would be down.

But since laptop is a portable device, and it is turned off very often, I've choosen to dual-boot it into Gentoo Linux and Wii-ndows.

Enough introduction, let's go back to the main subject

If you remember, you should know that at home I run an ad-hoc network between my desktop and my laptop, and that my desktop acts as a DHCP server and as a router. Although far from optimal, this network works and serves me well.

Or it used too...

Since yesterday, Windows Vista started to suddenly lost connection to my wi-fi network. I've not investigated it, but it says that it is somehow connected to the Wi-Fi network, but not to the Internet. I see that it loses the IP it received by DHCP, and starts using that 169.254.0.0/16 address.

I don't know what happens, but I feel that, when it happens, I can't make the network work again without rebooting. It doesn't even detect available networks. What's more, when this happens, Windows usually can't shut down! It just sits there, at that shut down screen, with that rotating circle... And nothing!

My bet is that the network driver (or something inside the network subsystem) is buggy and maybe crashes. I've never had this problem before on Linux.

I has been just 2 months since Windows was installed. Actually, 2 months minus 1 week (or 1.75 month, if you prefer).

I don't know what could have caused this... Maybe because I installed Skype on Windows during the weekend? But it makes no sense at all.

BTW, Skype (both the beta and non-beta versions) has a truly awful interface. (Update: uninstalling Skype did not solve the problem)

Well, wish me luck. At least on Linux, if wi-fi starts to misbehave, I can simply remove the kernel module and load it again. On Windows... well... I don't know.

Update on 2008-10-23: Looks like I found a workaround. I've noticed that Wi-Fi stops working whenever it has no traffic (or almost no traffic) for a while (like, maybe, 5~10 minutes). Thus, I can keep my Wi-Fi alive by forcing network traffic. Now I leave some program in my laptop connected to my desktop, in order to keep generating traffic.