icon in the task bar. If you see a full battery
icon or a part full
icon, you are on battery power. Check your power adapter connections and confirm power is turned on at the wall plate. This tip covers how to fix a Win 10 network connection that periodically disconnects.
This issue can appear to suddenly arise but is usually associated with a Windows 10 background update and you may not even be aware an update has occurred. The most likely reason is that the update has inadvertently messed with a power saving setting so that after a certain period, the network adapter gets powered down, leaving you without a network connection. This occurs for both wired and wireless connections. A typical symptom of this issue will be a predictable period before the network connection drops and that it can be fixed (for the same predictable period) by disabling then re-enabling the active adapter.
Windows 10, like previous versions, has many options to save power and has separate settings for battery and mains power. If you have not changed the default settings, you will likely have some enabled for battery and few or none enabled for mains power. One of the available settings is to power down the network adapter. This is only available for battery. Windows 10 only updates on mains power and needs to be sure the network connection is active.
The first step is to check that you are definitely on mains power. You should see the mains power
icon in the task bar. If you see a full battery
icon or a part full
icon, you are on battery power. Check your power adapter connections and confirm power is turned on at the wall plate.
Click the Search
icon in the task bar then type "power". You should see "Power & sleep settings" in the search results. Click this. Scroll down to view the setting for the Network connection on battery power. Set this to "Never". If you were already on mains power and still get the periodic network disconnection, the update has likely messed with the settings. To fix this, change the Sleep setting to something different, wait a moment, then change it back to what you had. Typically, this will be set to "Never" so just change it to say "5 hours", wait a moment, then change it back to "Never". This should re-establish the "always on" status for the network setting. Note that a setting is automatically saved when you change it.