Question One PC in my home network freezes/locks up and takes down the whole network with it! Have you seen something like this?

[iamgenius]

I started experiencing this like two months ago. The network will just stop. My main machine won't even ping the router. Doing everything won't fix it even rebooting the router. I was puzzled but after few times I figured out the culprit. It was of the PC's that is hooked up to the router by a cat6 cable. If rebooted or shutdown, the network will come back to life, which was weird. It happened many times now and it is confirmed. Very often the pc will be frozen when it happens. I have about 22 devices connected to my network between wired and wireless. When it happens, nothing will work except connecting connecting to the main router wifi. Wired devices won't work, which is the same reason other access points won't work either because they are hooked up to the main router via cables of course. Have you seen something like this? I think it is weird. It never happened before and I have had the pc in question hooked to the same network for about 5 years now. I don't remember changing any settings lately.

It is something similar to this:

Redirecting

answers.microsoft.com

The pc causing this is fine as far as I can tell. It just works with everything. It is not overclocked. Supposedly malware clean(I'm using bitdefender). The only bad symptom is just this freezing which causes the whole network to collapse. Like I said it just happened lately.


Last time it happened is few minutes ago. If I run ping yahoo.com -t in my command prompt, it will give me request times out, but the second I hit the reboot button on the culprit machine I will start seeing a reply!

What do you think it could be? What suggested tests would like to me do?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Tech Junky]

First thing that comes to mind is swap the NIC in the PC.

 

[Muadib]

First thing that comes to mind is swap the NIC in the PC.

I agree! The only time I had this issue was when my switch was bad. Start with your NIC or swap out your switch or router.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Did your son plug in an "etherkiller" to mess with you.


/s

 

[VirtualLarry]

Very often the pc will be frozen when it happens.

That does sound like a bad NIC.

 

[iamgenius]

First thing that comes to mind is swap the NIC in the PC.

Hmmm, that won't set me back too much. Worth a try. So I'll have to disable the built-in one and install another external one.

 

[iamgenius]

I agree! The only time I had this issue was when my switch was bad. Start with your NIC or swap out your switch or router.

It is not the switch or the router because when I power cycled them it didn't help. I had to turn off or reboot the frozen PC.

 

[Tech Junky]

Hmmm, that won't set me back too much. Worth a try. So I'll have to disable the built-in one and install another external one.

Or just replace the internal one for $10.

 

[iamgenius]

Or just replace the internal one for $10.

I wasn't aware you can also do this! Depends on the type of the mobo I guess. Mine is ASUS MAXIMUS IV EXTREME. Will need to look it up.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Or just replace the internal one for $10.

SMT soldering skills required? Or is that the price to send it away to be done?

 

[Tech Junky]

I wasn't aware you can also do this! Depends on the type of the mobo I guess. Mine is ASUS MAXIMUS IV EXTREME. Will need to look it up.

You can always just add one if you have an open slot.

If you are feeling frisky you could add a 2.5GB or 5GB card if you need more speed to something that has one as well. 2.5GB cards are cheap. There's a 2 port one on ebay for ~$50 or a single port on Amazon would run about $30

5GB though run a bit higher.

Looking at your board you have 2 Ethernet ports to choose from. Try the other one before getting a card.

 

[KentState]

The Delivery Optimization service in Windows has had the exact behavior on my home network. For some reason, the service was downloading Serious Sam 4 through the Xbox app as part of Gamepass, but all it was doing is sucking bandwidth. This happened a few times and eventually I removed all of the games from the Xbox app and I believe eventually reinstalled Windows. The best part is that I have Delivery Optimization turned off for both Windows updates and the Xbox app, but somehow MS still uses the services to coordinate downloads.

To diagnose, open Resource Manager. It can be found in Task Manger at the bottom of the Performance tab. From there, go to the Network tab and look at the second section labeled Network Activity. Sort by Receive to see what is sucking the bandwidth when it happens. You can filter the processes and it will show you the associated files.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Excellent point, KentState.

When I was on a limited-bandwidth connection, I would get sporadic network outages on my PC, and my internet radio would get interrupted, whenever Windows Update started updating one of my several PCs.

Solution? Well, I'm now on gigabit FIOS.

 

[igor_kavinski]

NIC misbehaving whenever the PC tries to go to sleep? Try turning off power saving features of the NIC.

 

[mxnerd]

Yeah, sounds like a bad NIC, but see if resetting network helps. Try updaing NIC drivers too.

Does Your Network Card Refuse to Reconnect? Reset Your Network Settings

If you learn how to reset network settings in Windows 10, you can use the network reset utility to resolve network connection issues much easier.

www.lifewire.com

 

[iamgenius]

You can always just add one if you have an open slot.

If you are feeling frisky you could add a 2.5GB or 5GB card if you need more speed to something that has one as well. 2.5GB cards are cheap. There's a 2 port one on ebay for ~$50 or a single port on Amazon would run about $30

5GB though run a bit higher.

Looking at your board you have 2 Ethernet ports to choose from. Try the other one before getting a card.

View attachment 62057

Funny. If somebody asked me, I wouldn't have remembered that my mobo has two NIC's. It is about 10 years old PC. So I switched to using the other NIC. Will see if symptoms go. If it happens again, then it is not the NIC. It is too hard for two NIC's to fail the exact same way.