Power Mac G5 Internet Drops Constantly

Hi all.

I have a dual 1.8 G5 tower, and am updated to OS 10.5.6.

Recently, my internet connection (cable line+ ethernet) has started dropping out. For a while I thought it was my ISP, until I realized that I could get it working again by unplugging the cat-5 cable and changing "Using DHCP" to Using DHCP with manual address," then plugging the cable back in and changing the setting back to "Using DHCP."

This fixes it every time. The problem is that it seems to happen more and more frequently now, often during big file uploads to clients. I've heard about people having similar problems with airport connections on 10.5.6, but never anything with an ethernet line. I've even tried a different cat-5 cable.

I am stumped and frustrated by this. Does anyone know what is causing this?

Thanks so much in advance!

The sad fact is your tower is getting a bit dated and the real possibility exists that the hardware could be going bad, specifically the ethernet card. You could try finding an external Mac USB Ethernet adaptor and see how that works to help troubleshoot. You could also look for a Mac compatible PCI Ethernet card and try that as well.