Network connectivity works in Windows 8 only after one restart

We have installed 15 fresh Windows 8 in my office just before 15 days. It happens with almost everyone that on early morning whenever someone starts a PC, everything works fine except Network Connectivity for a particular PC. One day someone finds that restarting PC solves the issue, and that is the habit now! This means whenever someone finds No-Network connectivity he/she just restarts PC and everything works just fine then throughout the day!

Points to note are...

1. It happens almost everyday.
2. It happens for the day's first start-up irrespective of start-up timing.
3. It happens with almost everyone.
4. It was not the case at-all with windows 7 on same PCs just before 15 days.
5. No network / other hardware changes has been made to any client PC or server in past 4-5 months.
6. We have installed fully licensed OS in our PCs.
7. All PCs are set to download updates automatically.

My questions are...

1. Is that the case with anyone else?
2. Do we need to apply any specific hidden / manually downloadable update from Microsoft for the same?

Solution 1:

Specific answers to the questions:

1. No
   
2. No
   

But - I had a similar issue on one PC. It had 2 network cards in it, both were recognised fine, but we were using only one. Then we removed one and for a few days the other worked fine then it started not working on the network. After one or two reboots it would start working - or sometimes delete it from device manager and then rescan for hardware changes would make it work. But it happened too often to be acceptable.

So we put the old card back in again and now both cards seem to work fine. The cards are a generic Realtek clone of some sort and a D-Link 528.

This is the only PC it is happening on. The two other Windows 8 PCs work fine. All other XP and Win7 machines are fine.

I think you're approach to this has to be slow and steady - and possibly long and painful!

Because of the number of machines it happens on it seems more network related but if all the machines are the same spec it may also be hardware related.

As a start - in no particular order:

• Uninstall & reinstall NIC cards and drivers
• See if there is are newer drivers available
• Replace with a new and different cards
• Check DHCP server settings and availability
  • eg is it only the first machine of the day to start that has the problem?
  • is the DHCP server in sleep mode and waking up "slowly"?
• Check the order of machine start-up. Is there a pattern or correlation between start order and failure?
• Other hardware that's common to the failing machines?
• If all the machines start up at the same time is there some kind of bottleneck in giving out DHCP addresses?

Plus many more I can't think of at the moment!

Solution 2:

Try removing the Power Management for the network cards. I had a similar issue and after removing it, the problem was solved. My problem was a bit different because the wire was not connected and everything seemed OK. Then you plugged the wire, but the PC did not detect the network until the PC was restarted the network. The network card seemed and everything seemed to be OK. The solution was to remove the Power Management. Hope it helps.

Solution 3:

I fixed the problem as follows: - Control Panel - Power Options/Choose what power buttons do/Change settings that are currently unavailable/De-select "Turn on fast start-up".

Fixed my LAN connection problems and I can't pick the difference in star tup time.

Solution 4:

This could be a problem with the driver in Windows 8. I saw other problem reports with the Windows 8 network adapter driver.

You could try :

• Returning to the Windows 7 drivers
• Using drivers from the manufacturer's website (if any).

As a general remark: One should never migrate to a new Windows version before service-pack 1 comes out.

But as this was done here, your options if no driver version solves your problem are:

• Wait for service-pack 1 of Windows 8, hoping that it fixes the problem, and keep on rebooting whenever the problem occurs
• Downgrade all computers to Windows 7 and wait, testing before returning again to Windows 8
• Replace the network cards with ones known to work with Windows 8 (no idea which ones)