technical solutions and commentary

after receiving and loading my new Lenovo ThinkPad T61p with Windows Vista 64-bit, I would get random Blue Screens (BSOD) and the machine would shut down a few time in the first week of use. These blue screens started to occur more often this last week, especially after I installed my podcast receiver, and started multiple large file downloads.

So to figure out what was causing this, I installed the "Diagnostic and Recovery Toolkit" which is now part of the Microsoft Desktop Optimization PAck (MDOP). Once this was installed, I figured out that the NETw4v64.sys file was causing a memory error resulting in the BSOD. Using this information, I searched on the file name and blue screen. What I found was that all kind of people where having the same problem with the Intel 3945 wireless driver when running Windows Vista 64-bit. The problem seemed to affect any type of machine that had this combination of things, no matter who the manufacturer was. I verified the issue was the wireless card driver by disabling the wireless card with the hard switch on my laptop and ran it without blue screening for hours. The I enabled the card, started a large file download, and bang! in a minute or two I was staring at a BSOD.

the first thing I did was to download and install the latest wireless driver directly from Intel hoping that they had fixed the problem. So after installing the new driver, I started a new download and… BSOD. I also tried to install the 32-but driver for Vista but it wouldn’t allow the 32-bit driver install. I also tried to install older x64 drivers and nothing worked.

So, to fix this problem of the BSOD from this Intel driver, I did an "XP" fix on Vista. I downloaded the driver for the Intel 3945 Wireless card from the Lenovo site for Windows XP 64-bit. I delete the current Intel drover for Vista from Device Manager (Accessable in Control Panel) - including the option to delete the driver from the system. After deleting the driver, I had to install the XP driver manually since the Driver installation package for XP will not let you install on vista. To do this yourself, do this:

(to get to the Control Panel: Open the Control Panel / Select "System", then "Advanced system settings" / click on the "Hardware" tab, and on "Device Manager")

1. download and extract the Intel Drivers for the 3945 wireless adaptor for Windows XP 64-bit.
2. Find and expand "Network adapters".
3. Right-click on the ‘wireless network adaptor’, click "Update Driver Software…"
4. Select "Browse my computer for driver software"
5. Click on "Let me pick from a list of device drivers on my computer"
6. Click on "Have disk…"
7. Browse to the folder where the driver was located
8. Select the file wireless driver and press "Open".
9. And then press "OK", and let the installation begin