New router causing PC to freeze?

Cantra

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Mar 15, 2014
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I'm having a situation with my PC that sounds strange, but I only have one explanation, that changing my ISP (and router) is the cause of a series of computer freezes.

A rough timeline of events is as follows.

A - I upgrade from Sky broadband to Virgin, switching routers but using the same DW1525 (802.11n) WLAN PCIe card, which was already, and still is, using the most up-to-date drivers.

B - As of the very next day onwards, I would get infrequent (up to 2 per day) rock solid system hangs, they were unrecoverable, I had to do a hard reset. The screen would freeze, including the cursor, ctrl-alt-del did nothing.

C - I ran as many diagnostic tests as I could on my RAM, my CPU/GPU temperatures, which all came up clear.

D - I made sure my Event Viewer was set up to record the events leading up to the freeze, but this was inconclusive, it recorded an unexpected shutdown (myself pressing the power switch), but no errors leading up to the moment it froze. This made me believe it was a hardware fault.

E - The freezes were seemingly random, and had no consistency. It froze when I was downloading at full capacity, froze while only web browsing, froze while I was afk, and while playing games.

F - After a fortnight, I disabled the onboard wireless network card, and switched to an old ASUS USB wireless adaptor.

G - I have had a few months of use since then with no freezes whatsoever.

So I'm puzzled, could the new router and my wireless card cause my PC to freeze?

I can give further details of makes and models if needed - wasn't sure how relevant it would be since the only change was the ISP and the router.

Thanks in advance.
 
first things first. Have you tried running antivirus/anti-spyware software on this machine? Once you do that, try searching for the latest drivers for your onboard wireless cards. Uninstall the drivers you have and then update it with the one acquired. Reboot and see how that works out.

Best luck
 
Thanks for your reply,
1 - Regularly, and I run a clean ship. I have re-run deep scans as you requested, and they come up clean.
2 - The wireless card was, and is, using the latest driver, even as of checking after reading your reply.
3 - I have now tried the last step too. I removed the old drivers completely and reinstalled them, disabled my USB card and re-enabled my wireless card. It functioned fine on the 16th, but as of this morning of the 17th, I have had two complete system freezes, as per my original post, so I have switched back to my USB adaptor.