Ongoing Intel 5300 Problems

Getting increasingly frustrated with my new Intel 5300 half-height mini card. I put it in my Dell Studio 14z and have had fits with it. After altering the power management settings for Windows 7 so that it doesn't lock up the computer when on battery, I'm still having problems.

Roughly every other time I turn my computer on (whether wakeup from standby, boot from hibernate, or cold boot), the computer hard locks (requiring 4 second power button press to turn off). This never happened before the 5300 card.

Is this common for the 5300? Is it generally a POS? Should I just scrap it and get a 6300? Something else? Help!

 

I'm sorry you are having problems.
It's generally regarded as a good card, no problems like that here.

I did have some odd things when I upgraded my 4965, but a reload fixed it. I don't think it was the card itself, but it's hard to say.
Have you tried the driver from Intel as opposed to Windows update?

 

Already using the Intel driver.

When you say 'reload', do you mean deleting the device from device manager and forcing it to reinstall? Or do you mean physically pulling it, deleting it, then reinstalling?

 

I reloaded Windows.

 

the latest intel driver is the problem in my opinion: I rolled back to an earlier version series 12 and it behaves much better

 

You're right! The 13 series driver SUCKS. The interesting thing is that Win7 is only listed for the 13 series driver...only Vista is listed for the 12 series driver. Installed that and all is happy. I restarted 3 times and did standby 5 times...no problems at all. Plus my 'quick to wake up' is back! I was all prepped to wipe and reinstall Win7 or buy a different wireless card, but seems like there is no need now.

Thanks!

 

Good work fixing it.
I usually try to fix the issues, but every couple of months I like to wipe things and start fresh. When that happened to me, that was the case, I needed to freshen things up.

 

I used to do a fresh install between each semester when I was in college. Of course windows was a lot worse back in those days (although it's really not that much better, but window 7 is a good step up).

 

I wish!
I like to play with hardware and software which takes its toll.

I'm so good at it though, it's only a minor interruption.

 

I've switched to using virtual machines for playing with (software wise). It's easier to throw away bad setups. I miss messing with the hardware. I keep telling myself I just get a weekend gig at a computer shop.

 

Okay so maybe I was a bit fast in my response. The 12 series driver was much better, but I did still see the problem of the computer locking up during shutdown or bootup, just not nearly as often.

So, I wiped (AGAIN...4th time on this stupid laptop in a month). Leaving the driver at the MS driver for now. We'll see how this one does and I'll update in a few days.

 

Are you sure it's the wireless that is causing the lock ups? On two of my machines ASUS laptops I've had trouble with the AHCI driver or what Intel calls the Matrix Storage manager. Maybe you could download the chipset driver for your mother board. It's been a long time since I've owned a Dell so I may be off.

 

I'm pretty focused on wireless being the issue because I never had these problems until I installed the new wireless card. I've been tempted to tear the laptop apart and put the old card back in to see if the problems went away, but keep talking myself out of it.

I did finish the Windows re-dux yesterday and thus far things have been better. I left the wireless drivers as the MS drivers...haven't installed any Intel drivers. I've gotten 2 lockups on shutdown, but none on startup. Yet. We'll see how thing sgo through the weekend.