How to keep connection "alive"

....must be a setting somewhere?

[royalelephant]

Here's the situation. I have a router set up for wireless that's used just in the house, etc. Normally, all laptops and desktops just find the network on startup and connect. Connections are usually smooth and fast, but with one Dell desktop it seems that non-use of the 'Net for a period of time whether the PC goes to screensaver, one of the kids plays a game or we're running some offline program, causes the wireles connection to "die."

On rare occasions I can right-click the wireless icon in the sys tray and click repair and all returns to normal, but generally, the only solution to bring back the wireless connectivity is to restart the PC.

Is there a setting in the wireless card, MS's set-ups, or something else that would stop the connectin from going "dead" like this.

[Tapolyai]

There are several "keep-alive" tools out there that will send a single ICMP PING to a pre-set IP address at a preset time interval. It just sits in your toolbar, and does nothing else.

[royalelephant]

Thanks for the help. That ought to do it. Don't know why that angle didn't pop into the front part of my brain. Can you recommend a keep-alive program? I've been trying to figure out which are junk and which one works as advertised. merci

[Tapolyai]

Try sourceforge.net and Google with "keepalive" keyword.

[royalelephant]

Here's a follow-up: it seems most of these keep-alive's work by pinging every so often. Wouldn't google's gmail notifier nearly accomplish the same stay-alive goal by checking for gmail all the time?