PC keeps dropping out, have to keep rebooting router to recover

[AshG]

Hello, all!

This is a likely precursor to a second thread here shortly about replacing hardware.

My office PC (PC1 in the topology below) cannot seem to stay connected to the internet. As of about 3 or 4 months ago, I will come into my office and find the yellow triangle of frustration on the Windows 10 networking icon in the taskbar. My Media Hub sits above my monitor, so I just reach up and turn it off and back on again and everything is right as rain for a bit.

As my media hub router is an ASUS router, I've got the Connectivity Wizard on my PC. When the Yellow Triangle of Frustration appears, running the program identifies the router but tells me that I am on a different subnet mask and cannot log into the router. Bollocks! (Router and Media Hub remain on 255.255.255.0, PC changes to 255.255.0.0)

I Googled the issue and found instructions on how to keep the NIC from going to sleep, as that has helped some people with this issue. It has not helped me.

I have tried the following other remedies:
Fresh, clean SSD install of Windows 10.
Reset all routers to factory defaults, then changed minimal settings required for network functionality.
Tried every possible combination of Router and Media Hub (AC68U [1] and TM-1900 [2], both on stock firmware; TPLink AC3150 v1 [3] only as living room router as it cannot be configured as a wireless hub device): [1] to [2], [2] to [1]. [3] to [1]. [3] to [2]. The issue reappeared at all variations of setup.
I assigned permanent IP addresses based on MAC for the Media Hub and PC1.
Despite this testing and zeroing out of issues, the trouble still persists.

I appreciate any help you can provide. It only mildly annoys me to have to reboot the media hub router (although I'd rather not), but it drives my wife crazy to no end when she uses PC1 for graphics work. I look forward to your recommendations.

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My network topology is currently:
Living room - Cable modem (sb8200) - TP Link AC3150 v1 - wired connections to NAS, Fire TV, and Ooma

Wirelessly connected to:

Office - ASUS AC68U (Media Hub mode) - Wired connections to PC 1, PC2 (offline until my son is out of school in 2 weeks), Printer, repair workbench (currently unused)

Roaming - 2 Android phones - 4 Android tablets - 1 iPad Pro - 2 PC laptops - 1 Macbook Pro

 

[Brian_B]

I've almost always found this to be an issue with the wireless driver on Win10. Often times a cheap USB WiFi NIC (or going wired, as inconvenient as that can be) will get around it until whomever gets their driver fixed again, or the next random Windows update.