Long story, and there could be complications, but it appears the WPM300N is 'bad'?
Brief details, but my wife's computer (XP SP3) recently started freezing at random times. Once while surfing she got a BSOD. The last few days it had gotten much worse, sometimes the freeze occuring during the boot process, and again at random points.
What I tried was determing all new s/w installs and deleting them still didn't fix the problem. Next I used some Norton Ghost back-ups restoration from the time period she had the freezes... still was freezing. Next an image from long ago and it still froze. Got me thinking it was h/w related. She has a wireless mouse and keyboard. Put in wired units, still froze.
A few days ago my router died. It couldn't get a WAN IP Address from the ISP's cable modem. ISP verified the modem was working by having me attach directly to it one of my wired computers. This router was a new (2 months old) ASUS RT-N56U. I put back my old LinkSys WRT600N. In doing so I had to change the passphrase. This turned out to be a big assist to me determining what went wrong.
On each of the restores of an image, the system never froze, not until I connected to the router by giving the proper passphrase, but usually after that. When it happened (I did multiple image restores) when I was in Safe Mode with Network as it was connecting, the implication was clear it was the WMP300N.
As luck would have it, I had another card taken out of my old computer. Put that card in and so far, he computer has NOT frozen up. I've restored all the deleted items and Windows Updates and all other Updates (Norton ISS, Flash, Adobe) and it is running fine.
Is there ANY way to really tell if the card is bad? If I put it back in are there good diagnostics one can run?
Irv S.
