Since I got my Lenovo ThinkPad T410 (64-bit Windows 7), I’ve had Wi-fi connectivity issues.  It would connect and I could stay online for five minutes or so and then I’d get the exclamation point icon in the system tray.  Sometimes I could just keep refreshing a web browser for a couple of minutes and it would come back.  Usually I had to disconnect and reconnect it.  Sometimes even this didn’t work and I had to disconnect and reconnect several times before it finally started working again.  I Googled for hours and found all manner of methods for fixing it.

• Disable Windows’ ability to turn off the radio
• Remove the connection and recreate it
• Download this or that Hot Fix from Microsoft
• Update the drivers
• Roll the drivers back to a previous version
• Physically get closer to the router (not really an option since my laptop and router are typically on different floors in the house)

Nothing worked.  I noticed that if I was constantly providing network traffic, it wouldn’t disconnect.  For instance, it didn’t cut me off in the middle of a download, or while I was playing an MMO or something.  It only disconnected me when I had idle time.  Eventually, I wrote a batch file to ping Google every five seconds and this was a big improvement – I could stay online for up to 20 minutes at a time.  I was pretty much resigned to this since I wasn’t about to lower that ping time and risk getting blacklisted by Google (I could have written a script to randomly ping one of a list of sites every second, but that seemed like overkill).Then I was doing some extensive research on Android development—which involved loading web pages and then going idle for several minutes while I was reading—and the disconnecting issue got to be too much.  So I went Googling again and finally managed to find the Silver Bullet (at least as far as I can tell, I’ve been online for about two hours now without a disconnect).

It was in a Microsoft Answers forum post entitled Windows 7 occasionally drops the wireless connection from way back in November of 2009 (no idea how I missed this the first time around).  I chuckled a bit at the word “occasionally”, but being a good sport, I went ahead and read the responses.  The first response mentioned yet another hotfix, but the next response was from Shekar Sharma, a support engineer.  He mentioned a couple of things that could solve the problem, but the first one was the winner for me.  It was a simple as stopping and disabling the IP Helper service.  The IP Helper service provides IPv6 connectivity over IPv4.  In my case, my network doesn’t have IPv6 (very few networks do, as of this writing) so disabling this had no adverse affect.  In fact, I had the exclamation point in the system tray and as soon as I stopped this service, the exclamation point went away and I had connectivity again.

If you’re having similar problems, definitely take a look.  If it doesn’t work for you…you’re no worse off.