Devilish Drivers

8/22/2009

A bad driver really can ruin your day. Actually that is optimistic, I wish I could have limited the damage to just a single day. If you have a D-Link DWA-520, I hope this will save you the headaches I suffered.

During the Windows 7 RC, every time I updated my wireless drivers my wireless card would stop working. Device manager would report a variety of problems, not enough resources, cannot start, or would start but not obtain an IP from the DHCP server. Each time I used system restore.

After installing Windows 7 RTM I stupidly allowed the driver to update. The default driver on the Windows 7 RTM install works fine, but the one from Windows update yielded the same results. This time however, no matter what I did I could not seem to remove it, and worse yet its symptoms expanded to complete BSOD's at random times causing complete system shut down.

I only solved my problem by reinstalling Windows 7 and not allowing this driver to update.

I don't know whether to blame Atheros, or D-Link. But considering that the Atheros update works fine on other machines that use Atheros chipsets, but non D-Link hardware, and my long history of problems with D-Link, I'm leaning towards D-Link.

A small bit of good news

On all my ASUS netbooks and motherboards, Vista and Windows 7 always seem to miss the ACPI driver. Installing on Windows 7 requires a bit of fiddling with the Vista drivers. Very recently and finally the ASUS ACPI drivers have been added to Windows update.

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