two unrelated customers - same loss of connectivity problem

I have two customers in two different provinces experiencing the same problem.
The both have a similar setup – a modem from their ISP, a router, a wired connection to the desktop and a wireless connection to the laptop. Both networks are secured. Their ISP at home is Bell Sympatico – both with a PPoE connection type.

Customer A has:
· IBM desktop
· Thinkpad
· both running XPP – SP3
· Speedstream 4200 modem
· D-Link DIR 615 router

Customer B has
· a generic desktop running XP Home – SP3
· an Acer laptop running Vista Home Premium
· Speedstream 5200 modem
· Linksys WRT 120N router

Everything worked fine in their homes until they went to Florida for the winter last December. They both took their laptops and obtained internet service from the same ISP, Bright House. BH is a cable service so I am assuming that the connection was DHCP (although I am not 100% sure). BH setup the users’ routers to work with their service and, to my knowledge did not make any adjustments to their laptops.

Both customers know each other but were in different parts of Florida and live in different parts of Canada. Since they have returned home to Canada they have been experiencing the same problem, they both lose their internet connection from time to time and have to reboot the modem, router and their computers to regain the connection. Sometimes going through this routine does not work and they are offline for hours until they mysteriously connect again. Sometimes, when the laptop connects to the network, the desktop goes offline.

When they returned I reset both routers to factory default and setup the connection and security to what it was before they left for the winter so everything is as it was when it worked fine. I don’t see any changes that Bright House made to either laptop.

They are both running MS Security Essentials and were last December before they left.

Can anyone tell me what I might want to look at here?
Thanks

 

I have tried all the things you have and it didn't fix it. One of the things I had to do was get the DNS IP address of their ISP and manually enter it into the laptop.

 

Where did you enter the IP in the laptop?