# Laptop Problem... Wifi Card?



## Who. Me? (Jan 12, 2007)

Evening everyone.

Hoping someone can help?

My laptop (Dell 1545 running Windows 7) keeps

freezing. Seems to be after about 10-20mins

surfing the web.

I've a suspicion it's the wifi card (Intel WiFi

5100 AGN), but Dell insist it's software related

so want to charge me for software support (the

hardware is waranteed).

I downloaded intel's proset tools and have

enabled diagnostics logging.

The laptop has always been slow to enable the

network card (takes ages from boot to find the

network).

The diagnostics show the two errors below, timed

to match the 'lag' at login, and then the errors

repeat as a continuous stream of errors co-

incident with the 'freezing'.

Anyone know what they mean, or how to fix them?..

DeviceIoCtrlS24NDIS: (2) Failed to send OID 0xff100055 to driver. Error - 31

DeviceIoCtrlS24NDIS - Dot11ExtNicSpecificExtension failed (31)

I've Googled, but it brings up no matches and I

can't find anything on the Intel Proset

diagnostic pages.

Can anyone help? It's driving me nuts, I've had

to resort to lurking on TWF using my phone :-(

Cheers

Andy


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## Chromejob (Jul 28, 2006)

Couple of things you can do...


Disable the device. Can be done in device manager, used to be DEVMGMT.MSC in WinXP, no idea in Windows 7. This is done at the software (OS) level, so if the hardware is mucking up, this would not isolate it, in which you need to...

Power down, remove the battery, open the case, and remove the wifi card (presuming it's a MiniPCI card like with my Thinkpads), if you can. If you can, then the same tests without it, and if the lockups cease you've found the culprit.
Note: you may be able to disable the wifi card entirely with BIOS. If you can do this without cracking open the case (which might void your warranty), do so.


Now, if you can provide some logging that shows that something is going wrong with the hardware device, Dell should be forced to the wall with the muzzle to nose and compelled to take the computer in for warranty service. But good luck, these corporations make money by selling cheap and NOT having to lose profit supporting the system.

If you're not a computer geek, find a user group or something locally, bring coffee and pastries and plead for help. A skilled hardware hacker should be able to sort it for you.


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## Who. Me? (Jan 12, 2007)

I may have to eat humble pie on this one.

Spent yesterday backing up my laptop (took hours, as it kept crashing), then reinstalled Vista as a clean install and upgraded to Windows 7 (mine was an upgrade as the laptop was bought just before W7 was released).

Have reinstalled Firefox and AVG so far and it seems to have remained stable, touch wood.

Now I just have to reinstall all the other cr&p one application at a time and see whether it was software, or the OS that was causing the problem.

Strangely; it also seems to have fixed the lag in connecting to my wireless network from boot. That's been a problem since I bought the laptop (when it was running a clean install of Vista) :blink:


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## sparrow (Feb 7, 2009)

hahaha - don't feel bad - vista is undoubtedly the worst operating system I've ever come across. I bought a very high spec laptop a few yrs ago, but you wouldnt have known thanks to how **** vista was - one quick clean reinstall to win7 and its the best computer I've had, and its 3 yrs old!

If the problem happens again, see if you cant get a wifi dongle adapter cheap to just check its not hardware....


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