I'm hoping someone can help me with this. I have two computers connected by network cable to a Linksys Wireless Router and up to 3 other wireless computers connected to the network at various times.

The problem is with one of the wired computers, it intermittantly drops it's internet connection but the connection is fine on the other wired computer and the wireless computers if they are up and running.

Occasionally on the computer that drops the internet connection we get an error about an IP address conflict; but not all the time, this is much more rare but I thought I would mention it since it could be related.

We've tried unplugging the router and the cable modem and replugging them in, etc. and occasionally this helps but the problem continues to resurface with this one computer.

Does anyone know exactly what is going on and can advise us what to do to fix it?


Thank you in advance.

Check all the IP settings on your machines.
To avoid any conflicts set them all for dynamic addressing of a few months and go from there.

I agree with Curlyben. Another thing to check is that the router is set up to use DHCP (it must be if all the systems are getting IP addresses), but also that it is able to issue enough IP addresses at one time for all of the systems.
Basically, one of the systems thinks it belongs on a certain IP address all the time, say 192.168.0.2, and all of the computers will get IP's based on the order they are connected to the network. Computer 1 might get 192.168.0.2, Computer 2 would get 192.168.0.3, etc.
If Computer 1 thought that is was ONLY supposed to get the IP that another system has already connected and received, then it will give the IP conflict error, and will only connect if the other system has no network traffic at that exact moment.
To fix this, you have to make sure that all of the systems are configured to use DHCP, and to dynamically receive an address (round-robin technique of who connects first, gets the first available IP address), and this can be located in the local connection on each machine as well (make sure nothing is "hard-coded" or typed specifically in their connections for an IP address).

I hope that helps, let us know how it goes.