Troubles with brownouts re: internet connection

I'd be more worried about the brownouts themselves. It means the voltage is temporarily dropping, which to leads to some electrical devices drawing more current, the result of which is heat. Not a good thing for electrical ccts. Or something could be loading the system down, itself generating a lot of heat. You say it's only in your building. Does this mean the rest of the street is OK, while your lights are dimming?

Well, since the great blackout in Toronto and the States, I suspect the power grid is still a little unstable. Blackouts, we can tell who is getting them or not, but the brownouts are so short, it's hard to tell.

It's not a problem with your hardware, per se. After turning on a modem you'll usually have to wait at least one minute for it to establish a connection, & then restart the computer.

Do you have any kinda surge protection device Cav? Power spikes often come with brownouts & blackouts, and that has the potential to give you some hardware problems.

What are brownouts ? When voltage dipps below normal ?

Gautam, brownouts are just really short blackouts. The power goes off for maybe a second, then comes back on again. Surge protection devices....Monger, please inform...

Well, unless you're getting hit by lightning or suchlike, your computer's fragile electrical components are pretty much protected by your power supply (it's a box inside the 'puter). But you don't want your power supply to have to deal with that because first of all it'll have to kill itself by blowing its fuse if the surges go too high (or long), and even if it doesn't short the surges will wear it out very quickly ........dying power supplies cause some of the most difficult to diagnose problems that exist with computers.

A surge suppressor is an extension cord that does its best to equalize power spikes or flip a switch to cut its outgoing power if need be (beware of crappy ones though--I'd say get one with 600 joules or more).

What I'd recommend for you though is a UPS, which serves as both a surge suppressor & a battery, so your computer can ignore those brown-outs altogether.

You can easily get surge suppressors & suchlike which have a connection for dial-up modems (which can fry the rest of your computer if hit by a power spike), so I imagine you can find one with a connection for your cable modem as well, although I've never seen one like that meself.

Hmm...I'll look into it. We have the extension cord supressor thingy. It's weird....the comp is always fine, the modem is fine, they just don't wanna get along after a brownout. Strange...

Well if you've already got a surge suppressor I'd say no worries, as long as you can live with the computer shutting off on you like that.

Having to wait a bit to connect after resetting a modem is how they're supposed to work though. Reset the modem, wait 5~10 minutes, then restart the computer & it should work every time.

Maybe the computer does something fishy to the modem during that brief period of darkness ?

But I agree with Monger - surge protecters are essential, I have one fitted to my mains.....and considering the amount of times it trips, I am glad that I have it.....

The comp always restarts after the brownouts, automatically, and the modem does reset itself, but the comp still doesn't recognize it at that point. I always have to shut off the comp, reset the modem, then turn on the comp again. That does work every time, I'm just not quite sure why I need to do it.

That's just the way it is. It takes time for the modem to re-make the connection, and the computer needs to be restarted again after the modem does it's thing. Which is just what you're doing, so no worries.

Hmmmm - that happened to me the other day - and I HAVE a surge protector which covers the phone line too - AND my modem couldn't rejig itself.

What is a UPS?

Usually you just need to manually restart your modem, wait a few minutes, then restart your computer (like cav's been correctly doing from the beginning without knowing why ), to get it all to rejigger itself.

And surge suppressors only protect against, well, surges. Not power sags and brownouts, Deb.

As for a UPS, the simple explanation is that it's a surge suppressor AND a battery (so you're also guarded against those power dips and outages). UPS = Uninterruptible Power Supply.

Er - manually restart modem?

Shoud just be a little button or switch that says reset or power or somesuchyoumacallit

A UPS is external? You just go and buy one and use it like a power board?

Hmmmm - lol - my modem hides inside the 'puter - like stuff oughta!

Yup, that's pretty much it, although there be a fair number of different types, capabilities & features. Good ones can be a bit expensive though, so many home users like to just stick with joyless ol' surge suppressors.

Hmmmm - interesting.

Likely to be rolling blackouts here this summer - and we seem to be getting lots more thunder storms wot with global warming and all - I might check it out - thanks Monger!