Wi-Fi for my Laptop not the best

[WillNeedsHelpFast]

So starting the other night, I noticed I couldn't connect to steam and any servers on steam games for whatever reason. Wasn't able to. I get on my laptop tonight, still cant connect, and have no internet connection to any sites. I can load google as my homepage but nothing else.

About 10-15 minutes ago, I reset my wireless router twice. Each time, no difference was made. My router is plugged into my modem so I reset that. Reconnected to my wireless router on my laptop and I still couldn't get a connection. Finally I restarted my laptop and I was able to connect to steam/internet sites finally.

While I understand that sometimes my modem/router needs a restart, my question is, why did I need to restart my entire laptop just to regain a connection that works? I had no trouble connecting to my router, but I couldn't get any sites/steam until I actually restarted.

[DaveLembke]

What is the make/model of the computer, and router to know what hardware you have and look for issues?

There can be many reasons for this issue. One of the most frequent issues is when your laptop connects to an unsecured wifi network that has a weak signal and the signal is gone and even though your wifi is a stronger signal it doesnt switch to your router vs say a neighbors.

The trouble begins because the neighbors router offers an IP address and connection that is different than that of your own and so there is no handshake to your router, and so you dont have internet.

Other scenario I have seen before was a person living in a condo and as chance may have it the client and a neighbor both bought the same model router, never changed the SSID, and both had not set up wifi security and both were on the same channel and so they had all sorts of problems with it jumping back and forth between 2 like routers configured exactly as they moved around their home and one signal strength was stronger than the other and packets were fumbled badly in that mess until I sniffed out the wifi issue with my netbook and the immediately locked their router down and configured it to be other than the neighbors config.

Other scenario was with older computers with wifi and blue tooth devices in the home or office which competed for the airwaves. But this only affected a short span of computer models when wifi and blue tooth were both new to the PC market.

[WillNeedsHelpFast]

My laptop is the Acer Aspire V3-771G-9809 and I have a basic Belkin router. F7D5301 v1 is the model for the router.