Laptop going offline randomly whist connected.

[tomscaper]

Staff have laptops that have the offline files sychronisation set so they can work at home. They have started to report that randomly during the day the laptops will loose connection and go into offline mode. A message will pop up in the bottom corner telling that the computer is offline, they can then reconnect straight away and be back as if nothing happened.
I cant seem to see what could cause this, i thought at first mabye due to going in to power save mode but this happens when the users are working away.
Has anyone ever had a similar problem.

[gwendes]

Are they connected wirelessly? I'd be looking at the network switch or wireless they are connected to.

How many computers is this affecting?

[tomscaper]

No all the laptops are connected via points on the wall. We have 37 laptops it does this on everyone on of them.

[Oops_my_bad]

Has this only started happening recently? Must admit i've had 2 start doing this recently but we don't use offline files

[joe90bass]

We use offline folders here for the same reason you do. It has been a right pain, the major headache we have is losing mapped drives, resetting the offline cache seems to fix it (It could be a red herring, but it's getting too much of a coincidence!!!)

[Michael]

If they're connected via CAT5, are they all connecting to the same network switch? It might be the switch failing, hence all laptops having the same problem.

A simple way to identify this, is if the problem happens on multiple laptops at the same time. This would be a good indication it's a network problem.

[Jackd]

you could continously ping something that was on another switch and see if it times out on any and see if offline files goes off when you do it.

[maniac]

We had this problem earlier this year. You need to turn off 'slow network link detection' in group policy. That solved it for us.

What we presume was happening is the wireless signal was dropping below the threshold for this, so it was dropping the laptop offline. The only way to get it online we discovered is to force a syncronisation. Turned off slow link detection, and all's been OK since.

Mike.