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Intermittent wifi problem on netbook Sony Vaio VPCM120AB. Also, no WPS
A friend's netbook with Win7 Starter got a virus hard to remove, so it's time to format and reinstall everything. After reinstalling Win7 Starter 32-bit and properly validating it with the serial on the tag under the notebook (which is strangely different from the serial I stripped from the registry), updated everything, installed and validated Office with original S/N, installed a few other essentials (MSE, Chrome, Adobe Reader, drivers from Sony website (but NOT the bloatware programs), 7-zip, etc) and installed linux in dual boot. Connected normally to my home router and I didn't see any problems with connection dropping, but wouldn't connect to my friend's wifi using windows - which is strange, because it always used to connect to it with no problems and no other smartphone/pc has problems connecting to it. It would tell me "wrong password" as soon as I hit enter, seemingly without checking wifi's password. I had no problems connecting when booted to linux, though.
Then I brought it back home, reinstalled everything from the start, re-updated everything, etc. While in windows, the netbook disconnected once from my home's wifi and would show a "red X" over the network icon, which I assumed to be because I was updating drivers, installing stuff, etc, so I just rebooted and everything worked normally. But this time win7 still wouldn't connect to her network, despite linux would connect normally. After fiddling with her router a little, I did manage to connect to it by disabling WPS, but now the wifi connection keeps dropping for no apparent reason and the "red X" over the networking icon shows, and no wifi networks are shown.
To make matters even more strange, I plugged an external usb-to-wifi adapter and it would work normally even when I had the "red X" while using the internal wifi board, but (iirc) it still wouldn't work with the router when wps was enabled.
So, WPS wouldn't work at all and internal wifi would fail sometimes, which is solved by rebooting. Even while internal wifi was on "fail state", external wifi would work normally; not a hardware problem because everything works under linux.
I would assume this is due to some file corruption, but it doesn't make much sense because windows should make some CRC check of its files when installed. Win7 DVD is in decent condition, altough not completely scratch-free, just minor scratchs. Tried to manually remove and reinstall the driver, also downloaded a driver update from Sony's website but it didn't solve anything.
Checking on "Administrative Tools", I could see the log I've attached (change extension to .evtx). It seems there's some problems with ODBC, also some SQL query, and sometimes the registry takes too long to update. I have no clue what could be causing these symptoms and how they could be interfering with wifi, though.
Any ideas? Requests for more info? Any clue on how can I get a new Win7 DVD (preferably free, since I already have the serial)? :P
Last edited by eliasalberto; 09 Aug 2012 at 04:11. Reason: added attached file