So, this is for anyone who might have ANY idea on how to help me... I installed Windows 8 about 2 months ago, and except for one problem, the experience has been fantastic. The problem is that every so often (ranges from 2x a day to once or twice a week), my wifi connection stops connecting to the internet. I use a USB Netgear adapter, and I am using a beta Windows 8 driver (which nobody else seems to be having any problems with from reading support forums for the device. What happens is that I will suddenly lose active connection to the internet, though my connection icon looks identical. However, if I look at the adapter, its activity light is going crazy like I am downloading something huge. If I wait a couple minutes, the connection icon eventually pops up with the yellow warning sign that I have lost connection to the internet. At this point, I have two options. If I wait a couple minutes, the entire adapter will disappear from windows, and I have to physically unplug the usb key and then plug it back in and it reconnects and everything is fine again. Or, I unplug it and replug it in immediately. Sometimes this works fine, but other times the computer doesn't even recognize its gone and still says I have a network connection. If I then try to plug it back in, no lights turn on and I am eventually forced to completely restart the computer. Often this is accompanied by other USB devices I have starting to lose connection (like my mouse will just turn itself off, for example). At first I thought this was a bug with the USB wifi adapter itself, and figured I was stuck until Netgear released a better driver. However, the fact that my mouse was involved made me think that something else might be wrong. I went to my device manager and saw that there was a yellow warning sign next to the "Reneseas USB 3.0 eXtensible Host Controller - 0096 (Microsoft)". I uninstalled the device, restarted my computer and went back to the device manager, and Windows 8 picked up the device and it now said it was working properly. About a day later, the internet problem happened again. I went back to the device manager and once again it had the little yellow warning sign beside the USB 3.0 eXtensible host controller. I have to think whatever is going on here is related, but I cant seem to figure out what. Any ideas? If it matters, I am using an Asus M4A87TD EVO motherboard, with an AMD phenom chip and a 64 bit version of Windows 8.
Something just occurred to me. This motherboard has both USB 2.0 and 3.0 ports. However, I dont know which are which. That might explain why certain USB devices are dropping and others aren't. Also, it seems like Windows 8 has a TON of USB stuff installed. When I look at the device manager, I have the following under USB: 1 - Generic USB Hub 1 - Renesad USB 3.0 eXtensible Host Controller 3 - Standard Enhanced PCI to USB Host Controller 4 - Standard OpenHCD USB Host Controllers 2 - USB Composite Device 1 - USB printing Support 7 - USB Root Hub Edit to also say - I just uninstalled the renesad usb controller and this when I restarted it didnt re-install it again. Also, I checked my ports. Nothing is plugged into the USB 3.0 ports at the back of the machine, everythign is in one of the 6 regular 2.0 ports that are back there.
It's supposed to have that much USB stuff installed, the driver stack is complicated. Why the USB/wifi? My guesses: 1. The USB/wifi is not that good, either at the hardware or driver level. 2. The wireless/router is not that good. 3. You got virused!
Answers 1. I know, but it was free at the time I built my computer and I never had a problem with it under Windows 7. 2. I would think that, but (once again), never had this problem under Windows 7 3. Crap, Crap, Crap, Crap... (if true) I have been running Noscript on my browsing, windows defender is up to date. Any recommendations of anything I can run to hopefully clear or prove this option?
1. Windows defender is a really good virus detector. 2. Sfc /verifyonly will catch other things. I'm just guessing, you're probably just suffering driver problems.
And now my fingers are crossed... 2 days ago Netgear released new driver versions for this thing. Perhaps this will be the fix I was waiting for!
New drivers, same problem. I am still baffled as to what could be causing this. The way I see it, it could be a single problem with the USB drivers/motherboard, or it could be two unrelated problems in that when I start unplugging and replugging the wifi adapter, the driver the mouse is using also crashes.
I saw this happen on a newish HP laptop with USB 3.0 and that same driver. What caused it was a Windows update that installed a version of the USB 3.0 driver that the computer DID NOT WANT. Uninstalling the driver and going back to the one off HP's site fixed the issues. Find the most recent driver for the USB 3.0 devices from the manufacturer's website, uninstall the current ones, and then install the ones you downloaded, see if that does the trick.
