New
#1
The Fix To My Wireless Woes
...has to do with my USB chipset?
Disclaimer before I get into this: Apply any of the below at your own risk (It means applying a hotfix), but I get the feeling that if you're having the same problems I did, this may help.
Let me begin here by enumerating the problems I had with 64-Bit Windows 7 Professional (Until today), many of which I recall a number of other people here struggling with and never finding the fix:
- Internet connection dies on wake-up from sleep and requires a restart to get back.
- Intermittent dropping of wireless connection for apparently no reason whatsoever (While it worked flawlessly on another system running Windows 7 Ultimate and even worked on the same machine booting a different OS) and requires a restart to get back.
- Coinciding with each of these, my USB devices would somewhat frequently (But without any real consistency) die at the same time my internet did. And by 'die', I don't mean they stopped appearing to the system. They just became inaccessible. Again, this required a restart to fix.
For the record, my wireless adapter is not USB. So I never thought the issue was USB anything specifically, but I always figured there was some sort of connection between all these problems.
One common thread running between a whole host of people with these above issues was that we all had NVIDIA chipsets and we all either A) had 64-bit W7 or B) had at least 4GB RAM. Well apparently there was an identified bug in NVIDIA chipsets using 64-bit addressing that Microsoft released a hotfix for - You encounter problems when you move data over USB from a Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2-based computer that has an NVIDIA USB EHCI chipset and at least 4GB of RAM
Although the description explicitly states this being a fix for a USB-related problem, after applying it, all of the above three problems for me have been solved. No internet drops (At least thus far, which is about a 12-hour period - much, much longer than how long it usually lasts). No disconnected internet on wakeup from sleep (And I tested this about a dozen times just to be absolutely sure - before it happened with a 100% rate). No USB devices randomly disappearing.
Figured I'd share what worked for me in hopes that it might help some other people here with similar problems considering how often people were having strange issues with NVIDIA chipsets and Windows 7.