802.11a card causes system freeze on battery power

[Rupertek]

Computer: Compaq Presario 2100 series: 2.4 XP-M, 768 Ram, new battery, fully conditioned (aka calibrated). BIOS flashed to latest offered by HP, WinXP SP-1, latest drivers for all devices.

The Problem: DLink AB650 (A/B) works brilliantly on the 802.11a network only when external power provided to notebook. Unplugging the AC adapter causes the system to completely freeze if the AB650 accesses the network (works for a few seconds or so)

HP blames the DLink, DLink, naturally blames the Compaq

Any ideas?

P.S.
I have tried disabling power management on both the Compaq and the DLink. System still freezes (i.e. must remove battery to reboot)

 

[bcastner]

I would still blame the battery.

If all Power Management (OS, Network Adapter, and BIOS) is disabled, as you stated, does the computer run for around two hours just on battery?

There is something the ACPI portion of your BIOS, and the OS does not believe is true about the battery state.

In Device Manager, are both batteries listed in a seperate catagory as ACPI battery devices?

 

[Rupertek]

Thanks for the reply.

As it stands, the machine will run for at least two hours with disabled power management but I have *not* tried this while running the wireless card. (I will have to perform a run down test offsite as I do not wish to to shut down the wlan.)

The battery has a Microsoft ACPI driver (disabling it had no effect on the problem). The Phoenix bios does not appear to have any ACPI user settings available (!)

I am a little concerned that the run-down test will be meaningless unless the wireless card has something to transmit to (I beleive that transmission uses many times more juice than simply receiving.) Of course transmitting under battery power is likely causing the system freeze. Does anyone know if different brands of wireless cards use less power or is it function of the 802.11a standard?

any ideas?