I'm using a rather ancient Toshiba Satellite Pro A60 laptop, and it would appear to be using a Realtek 8139 chipset per "lspci", and I use xfce.

My problem is an odd one, considering the driver for this has been baked into the kernel for some time now, but if I try to do anything that results in sustained network traffic for more than a few seconds, such as playing a video, it will disconnect - the laptop must then be rebooted for networking to work again.

A small "twist" in this is that I've previously seen similar issues using USB wifi dongles, which almost certainly have different chipsets, and got me trying to use a hard-wired connection in the first place as a "fix". Again, only a full reboot will re-enable networking.

Realistically, I'm an almost total newbie (so answers to suit if possible !), but it's got me foxed - if I boot into Windows and use the same hard-wired connection I don't get this loss of connection at all.

Are you using a really old kernel? I see an Ubuntu icon, but you really haven't given us much information on this. Are there known bugs for your kernel rev?

I'm pretty much up to date with all updates, and have been on an ongoing basis (although I'm currently only checking every 2 weeks or so when I remember, following an issue with my previous account)

I will have updated by the time you see this to 3.2.0-57-generic, and I don't believe I've missed anything older than 2-3 weeks, so probably 3.2.0-56-generic (but I don't know how to check without rebooting)

The issue has been ongoing for a long time, and certainly isn't kernel specific - I'm currently using xubuntu 11.10

Bump :-}

FWIW this page seems to have helped my particular issue;

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...estore-800391/

Essentially you add "nomodeset" to the config line in grub.

The "live" restart of networking didn't ever resolve my issue, I'd tried it previously.