blue screen of death, at one physical location only

[twinbytes]

Very bizzar situation. I have a customer with a very weird problem. Their laptop keeps giving the blue screen of death. Originally it was the memory and that was fixed and works fine at my office. I took it to his place and almost immediately does the blue screen of death. I format and fresh install Windows XP. Works perfect again. I had it for 3 days testing. Cold boot, warm boot, on and off for three days working perfectly. I even brought to my house and works great.

Soon as I bring to his house it immeditately goes to the blue screen of death. We cold boot, warm boot and goes into Windows fine and within a minute it crashes to blue screen of death, memory dump. I'm at a loss here. I bring it home just to see if it would work. As bizzar as this sounds, I thought I'd try anyway just for kicks and to really know for sure. Guess what? The bloody laptop works flawlessly at my home without doing any fixes. I turned it off after 20 minutes of working fine and turned it back on again and works fine again.

Just so you know, no other hardware or devices where plugged in at any time. Only power was used. And we even tested the theory of not using the power cord, and it still crashed at his house.

This is very strange and I have no clue what could possibly be going on other than some ghost like activity at his house that just doesn't want this laptop to work there.

Any ideas?

Daniel

[PC_LOAD_LETTER]

What does your PKE Meter read at his house?

hehe j/k

only theory i have besides the ghost theory is that perhaps the laptop has built in Wifi and is set to autoconnect to an access point that is in/near his house and some problem with his Wifi software/hardware is cause a BSOD in Windows and when it was at your house you either didnt have wifi or an AP that it recognized so it didnt attempt to connect there so not BSOD. if it has a wifi card try disabling it in the BIOS wihile offsite and see if the same behavior occurs again. If the laptop doesnt have Wifi, then Im sure you can find ghostbusting equipment on ebay(they have everything else)

[twinbytes]

Thanks geek,

Your idea worked! I showed the guy in my office the laptop working with and without the wireless enabled. I then disabled the wireless and sent him home with the laptop. He gets home, the laptop works flawlessly. After 5 minutes he decided to try turning on the laptop wireless device and low and behold, immediately blue screens.

he was able to disable the device fast enough again and works fine with it disabled. Problem is, he needs wireless access at home.

Looks like the wireless is definitely picking up some single that is sending bad information to make the laptop blue screen. With this new information, I decided to unplug the wireless router in his house and have him turn the laptop on. No luck, it blue screened. So it's not his router but definitely something interferring with the wireless adapter causing a shut down but only at his house.

If anyone has any ideas as to why this guys laptop blue screens with the wireless enabled but only at his house, that would be greatly appreciated. Note: the laptop works fine with the wireless enabled at two other locations I tried, only his house it is not working.

[PC_LOAD_LETTER]

WOW that was such a longshot, I honestly didn't expect to be right

Good call on testing his wireless router first. That at least tells us its not his own equipment causing it.

from here I would try any combination of the following:

Check the XP Event Log to see if you can see anything about whats crashing the system (what i should have recommended in the first place)

Uninstall/Reinstall Wireless drivers (reinstall the newest ones available from the wificard/laptop manufacturer)

Disable Wireless Zero Configuration(WZC) Service and use the cards utility to manage Wifi (or if using the cards utility enable the WZC service and disable the card utility)

Buy all his neighbors good Wifi routers to replace their junk ones which could be causing the issue

Cut all of the neighbors power to their houses and quickly enable Wifi before they figure it out and see if it BSODs

Move Out?

[twinbytes]

You were guessing??? lmao!!!

The computer was rebuilt before my original post as assuming this was part of the issue along with some other weird stuff. Rebuilding the computer including all new drivers for everything didn't help. He does have the computer working at yet another location as is. He has his son coming over in the next few days to see how his laptop works at his place, and I'm probably bringing my laptop soon also to try at his house to see how my laptop behaves there. I'll let you know once we try these other things and check his event logs, etc.

[ejfadrigo]

did you tried to check the wireless connection in your office is it working? try to upgrade the wireless driver and application, i have same problem but in bluetooth.. everytime I switched on my BT in my loptop the BOD and mem dump appear.. i just update the driver and i works fine.. hope it works...

[twinbytes]

Thanks guys. Reinstalling the wireless driver actually fixed the problem. It's strange that with the wireless driver it worked at 3 different wireless hotspots no problem. It just crashes at his house. With the latest update to the wireless driver it is working fine at his house now.

[miater]

I gotta thank you guys for this thread. I had tied to install some antivirus software over the weekend. The install failed no big deal , but , it disabled my wireless interface, and every time I enabled it, the blue screen of death.

I went to lenovo's website, got the latest driver, installed it, and voila. No more blue screen.

Thanks.