"David Maynard" wrote in message
...

If your wireless card has a power setting try turning transmit power to
a lower level. They pull a fair amount of current, for a PCMCIA card,
and maybe the notebook is having trouble providing it.


Hi David,

The wireless card does have such a setting; I was (at least initially,
haven't pursued it much since but may go back to it) unable to get a decent
connection on the lower power settings last night, unfortunately.

I had removed the wireless card software and drivers from my laptop so I
wasn't able to try the power setting initially, by itself. Because these
blue screen errors have been blamed on out of date bioses in the past, I'd
been reluctant to see if the bios was related being as I already had the
most up to date bios flash on my notebook (it dates from May 2003 but they
have not updated it since my flash which was probably in June). I decided
to reflash the bios. The Dell utility offers an option to flash without
using a floppy; I tried that, but all I got was an error message saying I
already had that level of bios so the program defaulted to not flashing the
bios. The next time I refused the floppy-less flash, and forced it to make
a boot floppy with the bios on it, then rebooted. The bios flash (per
floppy) program apparently doesn't check what level you were already at, so
it just flashed the bios without asking.

I rebooted, loaded the software and drivers for the wireless card, and did
not get any blue screens. I had trouble getting a decent connection, and as
it was late decided not to bother with the access point last night and
deferred dealing further with this until this afternoon. After rebooting
the wireless AP, I'm now getting good connections on full power to the card,
but did not no go back to the power setting on the driver. Since I only use
the laptop on wireless when it is plugged in anyway, I wonder how much the
power setting really matters anyway, but if I get blue screens again I'll
try the power setting and see if that resolves them. For now, the bios
reflash appears to have done the trick. I should add, that since I was able
to use the wireless card for about 6 months without any problems and without
setting it to low power, I think this makes a pretty good case that my bios
got corrupted sometime over the last few months, for some reason, and that
this was the source of all my aggravations with my DLink card!

Thanks again for your input.

ken