Wireless LAN Card, freezes Laptop when inserted

[vacunita]

I'm an IT guy, and know my way around PCs(i'd like to think)
I've had this problem for a while now, it wasn't a a big problem since i moslty used wired Lan at the office, and when at home i could use Wired or Wireless. So It really did not matter, But at the office we are now going to change the wired network for a wireless one. So i need this to work Again.

I bought a Netgear Wireless PC Card bundeled with a Wireless Netgear Router. When i installed everything, it worked fine. no problems whatsoever. Internet was fine, I could access files on my Desktop from my Laptop flawlessly. Everything worked fine. Everything worked fine.

I took out the card from the laptop one day, because i wasn't using it that much at work, and did not want to risk loosing it somewhere. So i left it at home.So I came back from Work on day, tried to insert the card , and the system froze. So I rebooted the laptop. with the card still in it, and i could not boot the laptop it just would not turn on, so I took out the card, and tried to boot it up again, and it worked. it booted up to windows.
Once there I inserted the card again, and it froze again. Since I was going to reboot, i took the card out, before rebooting, and lo and behold windows came back to life, without having to reboot.

Here is the thing. I tested the card on severla laptops at work and it worked fine. Since my laptop does not have another PCMCIA slot, i cannot plug it anywhere else.

I need to find a way to resolve this. I've tried uninstalling the PCMCIA drivers and reinstalling them and Nothing. Since the laptop is out of warranty, i dnñt want ot go to Compaq and get charged 300 dollars for something i could probably resolve myself.

THe Laptop Specs are as follows:

Compaq Presario 2100
Windows XP Pro. SP2
256MB RAM
AMD Athlon Processor 2800+
1 PCMCIA SLOT.
Card Specs:
Netgear Wireless PC Card, 32 BIT Card Bus, MA521
802.11b at 2.4GHz.
Sorry for the long explanation, but I did not wan't to leave anything out.

I hope someone can help me, I have no idea why it's doing this, other than myabe a fried PCMCIA SLot.

Any help is appreciated

 

[bradroy]

I am having the same problem. I just bought a Toshiba Satellite Notebook from Ebay that came with a wireless Pre-N card (F5D8010). It had been formatted so I had to reinstall Windows XP. During the installation process, it would lock up on the "loading windows xp" screen. After many attempts to resolve the problem, I pulled the Wireless Card out and then tried to reinstall Windows XP. Success. Now that I had XP installed, I reinserted the PC Card. It locked up the computer again. Even after removing it, I had to power off and back on my laptop. After doing this nearly a hundred times, I am getting worried that I will wear out my power button. I hope we both find a solution...and fast.

 

[Nelviticus]

I had the same problem with my laptop, an Acer TravelMate 800. I tried three different wireless PC cards and all of them caused extreme slow-downs, i.e. computer freezing for long seconds at a time. There were no errors in the system logs.

In the end I bought a mini-PCI wireless card instead. These go inside the machine and are quite fiddly to install. If your laptop has a mini-PCI slot it will usually be under a removable cover on the underside.

Internal cards don't generally get as good reception as PC cards but at least it got my wireless connection working.

Regards

Nelviticus

 

[G0AOZ]

Had a similar problem with a Toshiba laptop recently. Downloaded a later driver for the WiFi card and that solved the problem.

ROGER - G0AOZ.

 

[vacunita]

bradroy,
I really only had to reboot my laptop once, after that i figured out that when I took it out, everything would be back to normal. But yes we do have to find out a way to solve this and fast. I'll keep posting if I come up wth anything.

Nelviticus,
Sounds liek a good solution, but I don't think my laptop has that kind of port, i'll chewck the underside and the manuals.
Any way, I haven;'t tried other wireless cards, but I did try however other PCMCIA cards. a 10/100 lan card and a modem card both got detected no problems. So I'm thinking its more of a:
"My PCMCIA slot doesn't like my netgear wireless card" type of issue. I've haven't tried to get my hands on another wireless card, but I'll try to get one and test it out.

G0AOZ,

I've done the driver updates many times without any results. As i said, i think its more a hardware issue than a driver issue, since it happens even before windows loads.

I'll post back if I find anything.

 

[Jeff701]

Add me to the list. DWL-G650, and the laptop stops dead with the card in, and it will not get going again if I pop the card out - it needs to be shut down completely.

Specs:
Compaq Presario 1510T
P4A 2.0GHz
768MB RAM
Radeon IGP 340M
WinXP Pro SP2
v1.08 drivers from Dlink's site

I turned on bootlogging, and with the card in the slot, the bootlog stops at this line:
Loaded driver \SystemRoot\System32\Drivers\HTTP.sys


Also, this is the A1 revision card. What revision does anyone else have? It's on the back of the card, probably under the barcode closest to the antenna, and it's listed after the serial number - H/W:A1 it might say.

 

[mark528]

Same Problem here, but only differece is that i'm not on a laptop. I'm trying to help a friend set up his wireless internet. He has a HP and we are trying to insert a Linksys wireless-B card. Having all the same symtoms listed above. Any body find a fix for this yet?

 

[Happo]

Just to tell you my experience with wireless.
Was shipped 2 notebooks & 4 desktops to setup and network (workgroup) in a small office.
The accounting package we use is extremely demanding on network connections, pings > 50ms will kill it. I was unable to get wireless stable on two of the desktops so eventually, after a hell of a lot of tweaking, I gave up and cabled them - no problems since.
1 notebook seemed to be working fine, the other blue screened at regular intervals when the wireless pcmcia card was active so i cabled this too.
3 months later one of the MS HF's seemed to kill the wireless on the second notebook. This was an issue for me and I spent a *lot* of time investigating it with many workarounds-two weeks later i bought a 50m long network cable...
So, from 6, i now have just 2 on wireless, and just quietly, one is looking a little shaky.
I should also mention that I had various software issues at the beginning with "in-house" written software, wireless simply added another variable that i couldn't deal with at the time.
It is my personal opinion that wireless, even on SP2, is not as "plug and play" (excuse the pun) as some may think.

All the best.

Daniel.

 

[Jeff701]

I've got more information - I think it might have to do with the Cardbus controller. Texas Instruments PCI-4410.
So, a request: check out your Device Managers and see what Cardbus controllers you've all got. It'd e most interesting if it's the same thing.

I also tried another wireless card, a Zonet brand card. Exact same thing - once Windows IDs the card and loads its drivers, the laptop locks.
HOWEVER, I booted the system with Knoppix, a CD-ROM based version of Linux. The card works perfectly then! It's recognized easily, and the lights on it start blinking as it seeks a connection.
So I'm quite sure now that it must be a driver issue with Windows' cardbus driver.

In addition to all that, I've contacted Compaq, Dlink, and Texas Instruments. Compaq says it's not their problem. Dlink simply stopped responding after a few back-and-forth e-mails. Texas Instruments says they don't make drivers. So, not much help from the companies involved.

 

[vacunita]

I have the Textas Instruments Card Bus drivers, so I fail to see how they could possibly NOT make Drivers.

I have have the Texas Instruments PCI-1410 Cardbus Controller.

I'm starting to believe it more of a cardbus hardware issue, than it is driver related.



Unknown has caused an Unknown Error on Unknown and must be shutdown to prevent damage to Unknown.

 

[Shifo]

I had the same problem and I found solution for it. I have Compaq Evo N1020v with Texas Instruments PCI-1410 Cardbus Controller, Windows XP Pro SP2.

Here is a quote from

http://forums.windrivers.com

----------------------------------------
Originally Posted by abdul

Right I think I've milked it enough, here's what I did and it worked. Go to

http://h18007.www1.hp.com/support/f...63_5178.html#31

and go to the sub-section titled Operating System - Enhancements and QFEs .Download all of the available downloads, the first one being ATI U1.....etc

This solved the problem for me, I did not change my bios settings or anything else, I just downloaded and installed all of the available downloads and when I attempted to install my belkin 54g from the installation CD it worked, it did not freeze and it did it NOT hang when booting my laptop again.
----------------------------------------

 

[Shifo]

correction: I have Texas Instruments PCI-4410 Cardbus Controller, not 1410. I've copy-pasted it without looking, but I think it's same thing.

 

[chriseubank]

Shifo, fix that link please it seems to be broken

Totally curious still whether this will fix your problem vacunita.. I'll cross my fingers for you This has been an entertaining thread to watch.

 

[vacunita]

Shifo the second link seems to be broken, the HP website comes back with a "we're very sorry!, The page you requested can not be found."

Please Fix it I'm also curious as to wether it will work for me. I hope so.

Thansk for the support chriseubank. I certainly hope it works.

----------------------------------
Ignorance is not necessarily Bliss, case in point:
Unknown has caused an Unknown Error on Unknown and must be shutdown to prevent damage to Unknown.

 

[Shifo]

Here it is:

http://h18007.www1.hp.com/support/files/EvoNotebook/us/locate/63_5178.html#31

Sorry!

 

[vacunita]

O.k guys, got Shifo's link got all the downloads, and here are the results.

So I ran all the setups, there, as some where specifially for the EVO and not a presario, they could not be installed. Mainly the Ati AGP bus Driver, and the Lid Switch Policy.

However the Windows System Disks installed without a problem. But did nothing at all to solve the Cardbus Problem.

I borrowed however a usb Wifi Adapter from a guy here at work, and it installed without a hitch. The Wifi adapter picked up the netwrok as sson as it was installed, and worked flawlessly. I'm using it now to access Tek-Tips and type this.

So seeing as I haven't found any solutions to the cardbus issue, I will use this USB wifi adapter. and work of of that. And I'll go buy a usb hub. Since plugging in the wifi adapter i only have one usb plug left at the back of the laptop, and it's rendered usless because the adapter is a little bulky and partially covers the second plug.

I keep looking for a solutiuon, and should one arise, I will post it here.
Of course if anybody has any questions I'll be glad to answer themn, since i tried every conceivable solution for fixing this one of them will probably work for someone lese even if it did not wokr for me.

See ya around guys.


----------------------------------
Ignorance is not necessarily Bliss, case in point:
Unknown has caused an Unknown Error on Unknown and must be shutdown to prevent damage to Unknown.

 

[nullimage]

Hi, I found this thread when looking for a solution for the exact same problem everyone here describes.

From what I've read this seems to be a common problem with Compaq laptops, I personally have a Presario 904, with somewhat similar specs, it also has a TI-1401 cardbus controller. And I've actually had this problem with two different wireless cards, one from Gigabyte and another from Asus.

I tried everything I could think of to fix it, including a BIOS update, which promised to fix "cardbus performance issues" and a keyboard controller update, you never know...None of it worked, however, by pure luck I managed to solve the problem..

By changing the shared video memory from 32MB to either 16MB or 64MB, the card works perfectly. I tested it several times and everytime I chose 32MB the wireless card would lock up the computer when inserted.

BTW, both cards I tried had Ralink (RT2500) chips, despite having different brands.

This was an extremely frustrating problem, and I would have never thought the video memory would have any influence over it, so I hope this helps someone.

 

[Jeff701]

No progress here unfortunately. I forgot to add - I am using a BIOS from 2002. The most recent one is from late 2004 for my laptop. Problem: When I put the boot disk in, it simply says "Incorrect model. Remove disk and power unit off." or something to that effect.

The readme file with the BIOS says it'll work on a Presario 1510T, and in the POST screen, the laptop identifies itself as a Presario 1510T, so I don't know what the problem is there. Compaq said to take it to a service center. I imagine they'd want a good bit of money too. Not a good solution.