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

Senior member
Jun 6, 2008
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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:


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

Diamond Member
Jan 27, 2022
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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.

1653429427387.png
 

KentState

Diamond Member
Oct 19, 2001
8,397
393
126
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.
 
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VirtualLarry

No Lifer
Aug 25, 2001
56,226
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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. :)
 

iamgenius

Senior member
Jun 6, 2008
803
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91
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.