Solved: Computer Freezes/Hangs With Wireless Card

Hi all,

So I've been searching for over a year now for why my computer was crashing every few days, or sometimes multiple times a day. Yeah, this has been happening for that long for me. I've looked at everything and finally isolated it.

Symptoms: My computer would just freeze up randomly after sitting idle for several hours, or during the middle of a game, after quitting CUDA-heavy programs, and after plugging in some types of ethernet devices. The freezes were just hard freezes, no BSOD, completely nonresponsive, and completely random. I could be moving the mouse and the mouse would just stop moving. The only fix was a hard reset.

I determined it was not the following:

• GPU
• CPU
• Overclocking
• Undervolting/overvolting
• Windows (though some windows updates seemed to make the problem better or worse)
• Drivers
• Commonly run programs

Fix: After replacing my wireless card (same model), all these problems completely vanished.

I suspect the reason the bad card affected the system like this was because it's tied to the PCI-E bus of the computer. I also suspect the only reason why it would reliably hang after CUDA-heavy programs is because of possible increased DPC latency on exit or something switching over that affected the PCI-E line. Perhaps it is something else but it seemed to show itself best in this way.

I just wanted to post this so that anyone else who might have these freezing/hanging problems would be aware that it could in fact be the wireless card. I found it completely weird and unintuitive. Who would have thought a $15 card could cause so much mayhem? You have no idea how frustrating this was to troubleshoot, considering all the crazy stuff I've done to this machine.

 

Hi dtdood,

Were there any other symptoms that led you to believe it was the wireless card? I'm having similar issues with my X200 (albeit only in certain games - KOTOR, Generals and Starcraft II - other games like Warcraft III or CS:Source run perfectly for hours on end), and I've actually been thinking it's the graphics card (or rather the drivers). Disabling the wireless card in the BIOS didn't do the trick - did you have to physically remove yours to make the symptoms disappear?

 

Actually the point of this post was that there were no symptoms of it being the wireless card...

I had problems when just idling and in every graphics card state. I never actually removed the card, I just straight up replaced it and poof, the problem disappeared.

If you're having problems with certain games, it might be your graphics card drivers. Have you tried changing them? Sometimes going back a version or two might help rather than updating. Also check your temps while gaming to rule out an overheating problem. The GPU will take evasive maneuvers once it gets somewhere past 100C, but if that's happening you should see a massive drop in framerates instead of a straight up freeze.