Network Disconnection

Hi everyone,

Really need some advice with this as it's causing me a major headache!

I have just bought a new PC and I'm using Vista. Everything works fine really, apart from my network randomly disconnects at various times after connecting. On disconnection, there is no network avalible for my router. The only way to reconnect is disable and enable the router and hey presto.. there's the network!

Now there are other computers/laptops that are on the network and they've never had a problem. My old PC never had this problem using XP.

I thought that as I'm using on-board wireless with my new motherboard, it might be that, but I installed my old network card (from previous pc) and the problems remained.

Two things to note.. sometimes the network will stay on for upto 3 hours.. when doing very little (although sometimes doing very little will disconnect a lot sooner) and othertimes when I'm downloading large files the network (on average) will disconnect a lot sooner. My internet isn't capped.. so bandwith is unlimited.

The other thing is that I have set my computer to be a specific IP so that rules for opening ports will always apply to my computer (Note.. I had the problem with the network before I did this). The odd thing is, that once I've been disconnected.. and I disable and enable.. the network will connect but there will be a message saying : "Another computer on this network has the same IP address as this computer"

Does anyone have any idea on what might be wrong here?

Thanks in advance,

Lee

Has no one any idea what's wrong with this? I thought it might be a simple common problem that a lot of people had had.. but maybe not

To add to that:

I am on a wirless connection with 3 computers that regularly use the network (although mine much more regularly)

The broadband modem is the Orange Livebox

The network adapter is Realtek RTL8187 Wireless 802.11g 54Mbps USB 2.0 Network Adapter

Hope this helps?

Lee