Weird Wifi Problem

[karldenton]

Hi,
A staff member has brought a laptop in today which has wireless switch on the front. When it boots up and gets to windows, they turn on the wifi and it gets blue screen, which is correct as there are errors in event log. If you boot up with wifi on it just scrolls round.
However, bring it to work and everything is fine !

[LosOjos]

What do you mean by "it just scrolls round"?

Also, you say "bring it to work and everything is fine", so does the problem only happen when they try to use the laptop at home?

[karldenton]

Gets past bios then restarts

[LosOjos]

OK so it sounds like it's definitely a hardware problem, but you say it works fine if they use it at work? Is there any security system installed, such as the type that requires a fob to log in? (thinking conflicts...)

[karldenton]

Yep, he's just brought it to work, i've booted it up and it works fine. with wifi on.

[jamesreedersmith]

Does he plug anything else in at home that might cause an issue USB pen/network cable etc?

[karldenton]

Pretty certain not as the wifi is built in.

[jamesreedersmith]

Check though as i had someone who had had wifi etc all set up but still plugged a lan cable in because thats how it was when PC***** left it. - Wireless was never used but was always on and he checked it was always connected!!

[stariq]

we had this same problem with some older acers we had here.

Switch the wireless button off and the laptop worked, on and it would blue screen.

when upgrading the wireless network we found out that the acers drivers were not upto date and hence the blue screen.

updated the drivers and they work now, also might be another consideration that the WPA and the WPA2 security keys may have something to do with this but not 100% sure.

The older Acers are on WPA and just waiting for the last few to die so we can close the SID

HTH

[Abaddon]

Saw a similar one on an HP NX9020 recently. Worked ok here, but bluescreen at staff members home. We turned off the built-in wireless, and supplied a USB Wifi dongle. This worked just fine, with exactly the same network setup. The drivers were all up to date, so we can only assume there was a basic incompatibility with the router there. Very weird!

[DAZZD88]

We had problems with the drivers for an Intel wireless card in an Acer Travelmate 290 where we'd switch the wireless on and it would BSOD. The error code on the BSOD indicated an IRQ error which with the fact that Windows manages interrupt requests suggested to me a driver problem. I updated the driver and it worked fine afterwards.

The bit that has me confused with your issue is, you say that you start up the laptop with the wireless switched on and it's fine. Anyway, the first thing I'd do is update the driver for the wireless. Check both the laptop manufacturer's website and the wireless card manufacturer's website and get both drivers and try each one.


Also if that doesn't work then note down the information provided from the BSOD and post it.


Thanks,
Darren

[LosOjos]

The bit that has me confused with your issue is, you say that you start up the laptop with the wireless switched on and it's fine.

My understanding was that this resulted in an endless loop of the BIOS loading, which backs up your theory about the IRQ conflict

[chazzy2501]

I had a wickedly hard fault that took ages to discover with wifi. it was the old Intel 2100 cards they would bsod the laptop if it was able to see (not connect, just see) a wifi network with WMM enabled)

Intel wouldn't update their driver for the 2100 so I chucked em out. Apparently this effects 2200's as well but there is an update.