This is yet another post on why the (cheap HP portable) Windows 7 machine doesn't automatically connect to the Internet when I take it from home - where I use Wifi connections - to work where I use Ethernet.

I now have enough information to state that it has nothing to do with the quality or not of the cables or of the way I shoved the cable into the Ethernet port.

Instead it clearly has to do with the fact that the portable needs to be switched on for almost two hours. Until then a plugged-in Ethernet cable (any) isn't recognized as being plugged in. After then (without taking it out of the socket or fiddling with it) the cable IS recognized as being connected (and of course then the Internet connection works).

Just proves it was a poor investment to try to save several hundred Euros (even more dollars) but buying a fairly cheap model that had every thing I needed in terms of memory; hard disks size and processor to write my 2010 SharePoint book.

At the time I bought it I didn't have a contract so the money seemed more important than it does now having put up with this problem for long enough (and not being able to use the 1 year guarantee because I need the machine until the book is written!)

Meanwhile I have this odd thing that the VM keeps going to sleep and needs to be woken up by accessing SP site pages on the server before client systems can access the server.

And I also have the problem that if the Win 7 system has been connected to the Internet for a while and I start watching a TV program from the www.zdf.de or www.ard.de site you can bet that mid-way through the Internet connection will drop even though all the routers are connected Ok and running the Win 7 recovery routine brings Internet connection back again.

Actually I suspect this happens after the machine has been connected to the Internet for a long while even if I am not watching a film.

It's annoying in any case when it does happen. The MacBook (OsX) doesn't do this and nor does the HP desktop (XPPro)

P.S. Proof of sorts that this was the right theory came this morning. The office was even colder than it was yesterday (I still have a sweater and fleece on) and this morning the PC was on for almost 2 and a half hours before the Ethernet cable (plugged in all that time) was recognized as being connected.