Intermittent "no internet access" and yellow exclamation mark

[pfm]

Router is a recently acquired Asus RT-N66 and wireless card is a Intel N-1000 (2.4ghz only) in a lenovo sl-410 laptop running Windows 7.
I have been having a problem lately that has never happened before in my 4-5 years of ownership of this laptop. Every few minutes (anywhere from 2-10 minutes) my internet connection stops working. The taskbar wireless "bars" icon show strong signal strength and shows connected but there is a yellow exclamation mark on the bars.
I have confirmed on other devices at the same time when this happens that really my internet as well as wireless is working fine and connected. This doesn't happen on other devices. So this leads me to believe that its either the wireless card or the combination of my wireless card and the router that is not working properly together.

Any advice or help with diagnosing and fixing this would be very helpful.
Things I have tried so far are reinstalling drivers, removing additional wireless managers (lenovo, intel) and just letting windows handle it, and also found one suggetion in a thread about locking the band to 20Mhz. Yet nothing has helped.

 

[L&LD]

Also try 'forget this connection' and then re-associate the laptop to the router again.

Or, setup a new ssid on the router (this is effectively the same, but you'll have to re-associate all your devices again).

 

[pfm]

by forget do you mean delete the wireless connection from the "manage wireless networks" window ? then yes I did that too. no luck.
I will still give your idea about changing the ssid a try.

 

[stevech]

by forget do you mean delete the wireless connection from the "manage wireless networks" window ? then yes I did that too. no luck.
I will still give your idea about changing the ssid a try.

Be certain that your laptop's list of known WiFi SSIDs does not contain any nearby networks, esp. ones that lack encryption / passwords.

Your laptop may be flopping to another SSID now and then.

It could also be failing to associate with yours, or associating but sometimes not getting a DHCP grant for an IP address. Changing your laptop to a static LAN IP as a test, would confirm/eliminate this possibility.

Of course, you want to run your laptop wired by ethernet for a while to confirm the issue is WiFi rather than your router on to your modem and the internet.

 

[pfm]

zombie ssids

looks like all suggestions are pointing to a ssid hoch-poch type of situation. I did go through a recent ssid spree when I was moving my set up to a new modem and router. On googling for what is a surefire way to make windows 7 forget the network I ran into some scenarios where even after you "remove" the network from the list of wireless networks it still lives in the registry and needs to be deleted from there.
I just need a reason to delete stuff from the registry so I searched in the reg for some old ssids I have used and lo and behold they were in there right alongwith my multiple versions of my current ssids (myssid 1, myssid 2,..). Got rid of all them and so far things look great! Haven't dropped the connection at all. If you dont hear from me again this resolved it! Thanks to all!

 

[fistv]

My 1900ac has done this a couple of times, on the wired connection to port 1, window8 pro. Initially I tried ifconfig /release and renew, ping the router, get response, no change. Finally I just fired off chrome and bang it went away. Made me wonder if it was some kind of sleep issue. That machine sits most of the day not used, now when I see it I ignore it, fire off a browser and away it goes. The wife who uses a nexus and her HP desktop has never mentioned a problem and I have not seen the same behavior on those.

 

[stevech]

most of the new ethernet switches have some sort of power-down/sleep per port to be green. Maybe that's not implemented correctly.

 

[pfm]

It could also be failing to associate with yours, or associating but sometimes not getting a DHCP grant for an IP address. Changing your laptop to a static LAN IP as a test, would confirm/eliminate this possibility.

Tell me more about this. I think this is the real problem.
I may have celebrated too soon earlier after removing the old ssids hiding in the registry. The problem still persisted. So now I have it on fixed ip for a couple of days and so far no issues. What are possible causes for this ? What can I check ?

 

[fistv]

Tell me more about this. I think this is the real problem.
I may have celebrated too soon earlier after removing the old ssids hiding in the registry. The problem still persisted. So now I have it on fixed ip for a couple of days and so far no issues. What are possible causes for this ? What can I check ?

Don't know, mine has not done it again since the first couple of days I had it.