Intel 5100 card freezes laptop

I have an Asus F3JP laptop with WinXP professional. I have an 802.11n network now and upgraded the old Intel B/G card PCIe mini card with an Intel 5100 card. As I had recent (October's version) Intel WiFi drivers installed the card was detected and started working right away. After several minutes the laptop froze. After rebooting it would freeze again after a few minutes.

Oh dear! I did notice during one of the reboot when the startup music played it crackled! It sounds like a driver problem, but all the latest drivers are installed.

I didn't expect replacing one Intel card with another would cause me any trouble as the laptop's chipset and CPU is all Intel.

Replacing the old card has restored the laptop to it's normal non-freezing state. Does anyone have any ideas as to what's going on and what I could do to fix it? As it's not my laptop I won't try to reinstall it again until I have some solid ideas to try out.

 

Could be an issue with the card itself. Where did you buy it? A lot of people, including me, have been burned by the seemingly endless supply of pre-production Intel wifi cards floating around.

 

Eh, I got it off eBay from a batch that were pulled out of some batch of superceded laptops, presumably ex-government or ex-business so they should work. It's an actual Intel 512AN_MMW.