BSOD only in one physical location problem

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I have a laptop that works fine everywhere. But when the user gets home and tries to start it it gets a BSOD. I said start it up and then go home and see what happens. Even though it is already started as soon as get gets home it stops working with a BSOD. When the user gets back in the car and goes out a few miles it reboots fine. I know this is more than a coincidence. This has happened over and over with various combinations. It only hoses up at his house.

The wireless is suspected. I am having him turn if all of on his laptop and the routers to see what happens.

Has anyone ever seen anything like this before where it is the wireless? I am out of ideas.

It is an IBM Thinkpad about 5+ years old. XP Pro., SP3, fully updated, all the latest drivers. Works great everywhere, even in other wireless networks, but just not at his home location. I have not read the BSOD dump for the latest incident but last one was an IRQ error 0xA, nothing that was obvious.\

EDIT: clarify - the BSOD is upon boot up and never gets to the logon for XP. The other BSOD was when it was already booted up an running, desktop showing, etc. and when he got out at his house it went BSOD and then BSOD upon boot up. Few miles from home no BSOD.

EDIT: forgot to say the system was completely restored before all the updates...everything fresh.

EDIT: further research shows it may hose up because of the N band only coming from the router or a neighbors router.

johnny

Posted 2010-02-11T15:24:45.057

Reputation: 1 783

Have you tried disabling the wireless on the laptop, or many laptops have the wireless cards easily accessible from underneath, you could try removing the card. – heavyd – 2010-02-11T15:34:51.667

That's what's next. But if it is what could be causing it? – johnny – 2010-02-11T15:41:31.417

Faulty hardware can cause any kind of very difficult to debug issues, including unexpected BSOD or reboots. Especially with the a wireless card that is always listening for incoming traffic, if there is a problem any wireless signal could trigger it. – heavyd – 2010-02-11T15:51:00.100

I had this exact issue. Only happened at one site. If I disabled the wireless card with the hardware switch on the laptop, it was happy. Never found the cause – Dave M – 2010-02-11T15:57:03.080

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I would suggest using Nirsoft Bluescreen View to see if you can look at the minidump file and see exactly which driver/file is cause the BSOD.

Link: http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/blue_screen_view.html

– commradepolski – 2010-02-11T17:37:17.347

Answers

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Yes - I have seen this lots on some of the early Intel Wireless Pro based cards when connecting to secure networks - I forget now, but I think the card came out before AES or TKIP (whichever is newer) became widespread and whenever you attempt to connect to one of these, it either hangs or causes a BSOD.

They released a driver update that fixed it though. Based on the age of the laptop, I would guess it was this, but it has been some time since I last came across this problem.

William Hilsum

Posted 2010-02-11T15:24:45.057

Reputation: 111 572

i updated the driver no more bsod. apparently it didn't like getting an n type signal without dying. – johnny – 2010-03-01T20:32:06.580

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Hows the leccy?

Some places have more dodgy power than others.. What happens when its running on batteries to boot?

Grizly

Posted 2010-02-11T15:24:45.057

Reputation: 866

Asked: 2010-02-11T15:24:45.057

Viewed: 206 times

Active: 2010-02-20T10:11:49.817