Restart Internet connection after standby

I have my Dell 8400 PC set to turn screen saver off after 10 minutes, turn off hard drives after 1 hour, and go into system standby after 2 hours. On returning from standby, it always takes 3-4 attempts to get to my ISP using either Mozilla Firefox or Internet Explorer. is this a common problem, or have I missed a necessary system tweak on my machine? All other programs including MS Outlook resume ok. I leave PC switched on most of the day and night, on broadband, and connect with a Billion ADSL/VPN firewall router.

I'd hazzard a guess that this is because all your info is saved on your hard drive and because you're turning it off, it needs to scan it and find all the relevent info when you go back on your PC. You're probably finding that it takes 3-4 attempts to get online because the PC is scanning the hard drive. Maybe?

Could be! Is there no way of speeding up the process? It can take up to 5 minutes or more to get on line again. My 80 gb system disk uses Windows XP SP2, and I also run a 160 gb disk for storing music and pics.

it may also be your network adapter is also in standby and takes a few minutes to establish a new link when coming out of standby, (ipconfig) look around in device manager>network adapters>properties

I see it does seem to take a long time but you really would benifit from just turning your PC off when you're not on it. I'd recommend doing that just to be on the safe side. As shelf life said, the network adaptor might be in stand by mode so this is why you have to wait until it finds itself again. All we can suggest is that you shutdown your PC when you're not on it. Maybe even make your PC not shut of its hard drive etc. good luck

Thank you all you your valuable advice. I was hoping to capitalise on these features in Windows, but it seems that they don't live up to the promise. So I guess I'll just have to revert to relying on a screen saver and turning the PC off when I go to bed.