Internet disconnects when its put in sleep or hibernate.

I have a Compaq laptop running Windows Vista. Every time I put my computer into sleep mode or hibernate it disconnects me from the internet. I have a Netgear wireless-g router and cable internet. I also have an XBOX 360 and blu-ray player both connected to it via ethernet cables. Im not sure what exactly the problem is. Ive tried disabling it and bringing it back up and it continues to do the same thing. This only started happening here recently. I did get a virus and had a friend from work remove it for me. The only thing additional that he installed was AVG 2011. ** I also have the most recent Service Pack SP2 Can anyone help me???

Hi welcome to the WTT forums, sorry to hear of the Internet connection problems.
This is a fairly common problem, so take a look here:
http://en.community.dell.com/support-forum…0/18921466.aspx
Try the suggestions and see how you go…..you may need to try them all, or you may get lucky and find that checking your BIOS and then updating Windows and all your drivers and checking all your power settings does the trick for you.
Regards
paws

From the link that Paws gave, post #11:

Go to Device manager - Network Adapters - double click your NIC - Power Management - uncheck 'Allow the computer to turn off this device.

I should probably read the links. But, I don't get it. If the computer is in standby or hibernate it is supposed to turn the connection off. How are you going to use it when it is in standby or hibernate? Do you mean it doesn't automatically reconnect after bringing the laptop out of hibernate or standby? And, what is it you do to re-connect it if this is the case?