Media center extenders freezing

I have been recently experiencing freezes with my media center extenders. I am using Windows 7_64 SP1 and have had no problems for years. About 2 months ago all of my extenders (I have 3, they are all affected) began freezing. The media playback or TV program just freezes, no other messages. I have to power off the extender (in some cases, unplug) and restart and all is well until the next freeze. Sometimes within an hour, sometimes the next day. I have searched the event logs and the message reads "the extender was abruptly disconnected". I can find no other events immediately before the freeze. I have completely reinstalled the whole system from scratch, formatted drive etc. and the same thing occurred. I am beginning to suspect a windows update in the last couple months may be to blame. Has anyone else encountered this problem? I hate to begin uninstalling updates 1 at a time. Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thank you!

If anyone cares....the source of the problem has been discovered... Its caused by accessing the Gallery on the Samsung Galaxy S4 when it is on the Wi-Fi network, 4G connection has no effect on the extenders.

epdavidson said:

If anyone cares....the source of the problem has been discovered... Its caused by accessing the Gallery on the Samsung Galaxy S4 when it is on the Wi-Fi network, 4G connection has no effect on the extenders.

Okay, this is insane. How did you figure this out?? I have the exact same issue, tried to diagnose this for days. I just bought the S4 and the problems started about the same time that I activated and starting to use the phone.

Now, every time I access my gallery on the phone, the Extender Freezes, on LTE/3G it does not. Why would this phone be causing my hardwired, GigE connected Extender, cause this to happen?

And now that you have figured this out, how do we solve this issue? I don't have anything from my network that I access through the gallery.

Any and all help is appreciated. I am very impressed that you figured this out.

kevonkothari,

This problem frustrated me for almost 2 months! I had been combing through event logs, rolling back windows updates, re installing the extenders, wiping my hard drive NOTHING helped. I then happened to read somewhere about the Gallery on the new Samsung Galaxy S4 causing network problems. Then it dawned on me that my older Daughter had gotten a new phone, my younger Daughter still had her old phone. Both Daughters have data packages for their phones and to save 4G data, they connect to our wi-fi when they are at home. I'm not that familiar with all the features on the new smartphones (I still have my 7 year old flip phone!!) but apparently this Gallery feature on the S4 tries to sync with any wi-fi network to view pictures or videos stored there. Presumably through some uPnP protocol?? Anyway, I had my Daughter access the Gallery while watching the extender and sure enough, it instantly crashed. When the phone is connected via 4G there is no effect on the extenders. What makes this problem so hard to discover, is that you wouldn't think the phone would have any reason to try and sync with pictures stored on your home PC...at least I didn't. Fortunately, the fix is very easy, but you do need a second wi-fi router. I had an old wi-fi router laying around and connected it to my network on a separate subnet. My main router IP is 192.168.1.1, the additional router is 192.168.2.1 so the IP addresses it assigns will be 192.168.2.x. The two subnets have no connection to each other. Tell the Galaxy S4 to connect to the new wi-fi network and all is well. Problem solved! Hope this helps.

Eric

I can't believe my new Galaxy Tab 4 caused extender to freeze recently.

Thx.