Hi!

We have no IT manager to discuss this with, and the person who set up our system is long gone, so please bear with me on this

I have a Compaq 6820s Laptop running XP Pro SP3 that works as my only workstation, as I spend a lot of time out of town. In the office, we have a server running Server 2003, which has eight stationary workstations (desktops) also running XP Pro SP3, that are always connected to the network. Mine is only physically connected to the network maybe 50% of the time I'm using it.

Typically after I've worked out of town for a few days, I come back into the office, plug in my Cat5 cable, log on to the network, synchronize, and I'm good to go, and my laptop behaves just like any other workstation on the network. I've been doing this for over a year now.

Just as of last week however, when I plug in my cable and turn on, once and awhile the laptop will tell me I have limited or no connectivity to the network. Sometimes a connection repair will do the trick. Sometimes, however, it tells me that it can't renew my IP address, and I'll have to reboot (once I had to reboot twice) before I can get a connection to the network. Once my connection was dropped in the middle of the afternoon, even though I'd been connected all day. My mobile workstation is the only workstation exhibiting this problem; the stationary workstations continue to connect to the network when they're turned on every morning without problem.

Right now, I'm actually connected to the network just fine, but when this happens again in the future, is there anything I could check to get to the root of the problem, and keep this from happening again?