Tags: | troubleshooting | BSOD | crashing |
2007-07-19 22:22
The Strangest Computer Problem I've Ever Had (part 2)
This is part 2 of a two part entry, click here to read part 1 first.
Search for the Culprit
As it turns out, a night's rest did nothing, and the next morning I was met with the same frustrating problem. The first thing I decided to do was to boot the computers into safe mode, at which point they both were stable. This gave me a bit more confidence, so I rebooted the computers into safe mode with networking, so I could try to run an online virus scan, and I was once again faced with the BSOD. this seemed to narrow down the problem, something was wrong with my networking setup on the computers. Since they both use wireless for their networking I disabled the wireless hardware on both machines and tried a normal windows session, after half an hour I had no crashing, so I was now confident that I had discovered the problem was with the wireless hardware. At this point I was thinking that the computers couldn't possibly have the same problem at the same time without a cause, so I dug through the closet and found some ethernet cables so I could run that online virus scan. I found no viruses, no worms, no malware, nothing. I even ran two different scans, and I still came up with nothing. Without an obvious cause, I had to move onto fixing the problem, if I could, and hope that in the solution I might also find the cause.
The Solution
Since I knew the problem had something to do with my wireless networking hardware the first thing I did was uninstall the hardware in Windows Device Manager and reboot the computers, allowing Windows to automatically reinstall it after the reboot - I made sure to update the drivers to the latest version before doing this, just in case older drivers were somehow at fault. I was still worried that the hardware was broken, and that I might never fix either of the computers, but I was amazed to find that this simple fix is what solved the problem in both computers. After an easy reinstall of the hardware neither computer has had a crash since. I never found the cause for the problem, and it's even possible that it was a really big coincidence. I am hoping that this problem never repeats itself, but at the same time I hope to figure out exactly what caused the crashing in the first place, eventually. My guess is that I probably won't and this will remain one of those many unexplained mysteries of computing. If you've read this far, then I thank you for indulging me and I hope you weren't too bored. If you happen to know what could have caused this problem, I would love to hear from you. If you have an incredibly strange computer problem that you've encountered, leave me the URL!
- Kevin
Kevin (at) Upcsite (dot) Net
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Comments:
That is very weird... I can't imagine why a hardware driver could cause a BSOD so reliably out of the blue like that. If you both updated the driver at the same time, then maybe it was a bad driver. But it doesn't sound that way.
If it was me, I would not have been able to sleep until I had the problem resolved. I'm crazy like that... I also can't sleep unless code I'm working on compiles and does what I want it to. Sleeping is not something I do often enough.
Cheers,
Neil
Posted by: Neil | 2007-07-20 22:56:17
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