How to test for a broken connection of TCPClient after being connected?

I've been fighting with one problem for a whole 3 days I can't find any solution, please help :)
I work with Visual Studio 2010 and C# language.

I have a device working like a server, that sends some data in a very irregular periods of time (not possible to define any read timeout).
I wrote a TCP client to connect to that server and read data. It works OK, however when something is wrong with the network and server becomes unavailable (e.g. when I plug out the network cable from my computer), it takes about 10 seconds for application to "notice" there is no connection to the server and throw an exception. (I don't know why exactly 10 seconds? Where it's defined? Can I change it?)
I want to react faster - let say after one second after connection broken.
Googling for answer however doesn't provide me any working solution.

The test code is below, I try to make it on 2 threads: one is reading data, the second one is looking for connection status and should alarm me when it's broken. It's not working neither for TCPClient nor Socket class. I've tried to read / write some data with tcpClient.SendTimeout = 100; and stream.WriteTimeout = 100; but it doesn't seem to work.

using System;
using System.Collections;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Net.Sockets;
using System.Threading;

namespace TCPClient
{
    class Program
    {
        static volatile bool _continue = true;
        static TcpClient tcpClient;
        static NetworkStream stream;

        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            try
            {
                //client thread - listen from server
                Thread tcpListenThread = new Thread(TcpListenThread);
                tcpListenThread.Start();

                //connection checking thread
                Thread keepAliveThread = new Thread(KeepAliveThread);
                keepAliveThread.Start();