How come everytime I take the network wire out of the laptop, and then I put it back in, I have to reboot the machine?

On my desktop PC, it's just a simple matter of putting the wire back in.

Here on the laptop, if the wire comes out, I get that little "info" bubble saying "Network cable is unplugged" or something like that, and I have to reboot the damn thing to get it up again.

Isn't there any way I can avoid this? And if any of you have laptops, do you face the same problem?

I have a Compaq Presario, AMD Athlon XP 1.4 GHz... Windows XP Home Edition.