For watever reason, Windows (out of the box) tends to be set to maximum power-saving which includes setting your network connection to go to sleep when it can:
- especially on workstations, and
- especially if you go take an extended coffee break or have a meeting.
This is not the best setting for any application, like Theatre Manager, QuickBooks or other accounting software that needs to connect to a database on a server.
We suggest disabling power management on the ethernet card.
- use instructions like this for windows 7 and 8
- Use instructions below for Windows 10 (they are very similar to windows 7)
- Open Control Panel
- select network and Internet
- Pick Network Connections. the screen should look like below
- click the network card
- right click and show properties
- click configure
- click power management and uncheck the highlighted item per the image below
In addition, please make sure to disable power management except for monitors.