Do you notice that the Internet is constantly disappearing on your laptop? It can be frustrating, but in this guide, we’ll cover three main reasons and solutions.
Hopefully after reading the various suggestions below, you can identify the cause and find a solution.
We suggest going through each option step by step, but if you are sure you can exclude a section, just skip it.
Switch to Ethernet
One of the biggest problems with internet disconnection, whether you are streaming, playing a game, or watching something on the internet, is unreliable Wi-Fi. While you can spend money on repeaters, hotspots, or other Wi-Fi boosters, you can never rely on WiFi to provide stable, low-latency network performance.
Wi-Fi will always have variable parameters and longer latency than traditional cable, so if you absolutely cannot handle accidental internet disconnection, we recommend using an Ethernet cable. Sometimes it can be a combination between the Wi-Fi card in the laptop itself and some kind of interference between your router and your laptop.
Anything from another WiFi signal to a physical object can cause WiFi problems, and it will never be as reliable as simply plugging an Ethernet cable into your laptop and plugging it into your router. You can purchase Ethernet cables up to 100 meters long on Amazon for a reasonable price, so it’s a cheap solution even if you don’t have the hardware yet.
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If you are unable to get an Ethernet cable, or are still having problems disconnecting the Internet on your laptop, even over Ethernet, we have several solutions for you below.
Check drivers
Most drivers should work when you buy a new laptop for the first time, but some drivers can be out of date, especially if you have to make new Windows 10 updates right out of the box.
This means that to fix the network connection on your laptop, you just need to update your network drivers to the latest version. Instead of using any of the driver CDs that came with your laptop, you should go straight to the drivers website to get the latest version. We’ll walk you through all the necessary steps below.
- First open the Start menu and search for Device Manager.
- Then click “Device Manager” in the search results.
- In the Device Manager window, find your network adapters.
- Click the arrow next to the network adapters to open the list.
You should now have a list of drivers. On this page, you should find the Ethernet driver and wireless adapter. In our case, we found a Killer E2500 Gigabit Ethernet # 2 controller and a Killer Wireless-AC 1550i adapter. Now that we have two driver names, one for WiFi and one for Ethernet, we need to google those names to find the latest updates for these drivers.
When looking for these drivers, be sure to download them from the official site. For example, in our case, we’ll go straight to the Killer site. Read the download page carefully – there are often different download options available, but you only need the driver itself and not any additional malware.
You will be able to find direct download links for drivers only and hopefully information on when the last driver update was released. Once downloaded, launch the program and go through the installation process. After completing the process, it is best to restart your laptop.
After that, you can run a network test or start your day as usual and hopefully the internet problem is resolved.
Disable or stop OneDrive or cloud-based apps
Your laptop may be working completely fine, but applications can cause bandwidth issues that cause your internet to freeze for a second. The biggest culprit for this could be cloud apps. If you have cloud save configured, you should uninstall or restrict these apps.
Having a cloud-based backup app keeping everything in the background shouldn’t affect basic internet usage. However, if you need a persistent network connection, such as when playing games or streaming, you can restrict their access.
Each cloud storage app has different settings, but we’ll explain how to stop OneDrive from running in the background. OneDrive is the default cloud storage app in Windows 10, and some people might activate it without even realizing it.
To pause OneDrive, click the arrow in the notification area at the bottom right of the screen.
Then right-click the OneDrive cloud icon. Then you will be presented with several options. Click Pause Sync and select one of the available options.
If you use this option, you will only pause syncing for the selected time. After this time, you must manually suspend it again. If you’d rather turn off OneDrive completely, follow these steps.
Unfortunately, most versions of Windows 10 won’t allow you to uninstall OneDrive, so you must unlink your account instead. If you do this, your laptop will no longer sync files. To do this, open the toolbar in the notification area as before. Then right-click the OneDrive icon.
From here click on Settings. In the new window that appears, click “Turn off computer”. If prompted, click Unlink Account.
If you’re not using OneDrive but are using a different cloud app, you can uninstall it by searching the Start menu for Add or Remove Programs.
Restrict home network activity
If you’ve followed all the steps so far and still haven’t found a solution, your next tip is to monitor your network activity when you notice a dropout.
It can be a process of trial and error, but the best way to do it is to disconnect all devices connected to the Internet and then reconnect each device one by one, performing network tests between them. Keep doing this until you find the device that might be causing the problem.
You can then examine that device to see if it is downloading or downloading content in the background. Some examples might include smart technologies like Amazon Echo or Google Assistant, which might have backups enabled. It could also be a smartphone or other internet-connected device that uploads files to a cloud-based backup service.
Summary
It can take a while to find the exact cause of your internet connection problems, but the upside is that once you find it, you won’t have to fix the same problems again.
Hopefully this guide helped you understand why the internet on your laptop keeps getting disconnected. If you need help after reading this article, please leave a comment and I will try to answer you as soon as I can.
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