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PC's Freezing on 5Ghz band WiFi

RS16
Beginner
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Hello. I work in a school where we purchased 70 Dell Latitude E5430 laptops. Every laptop is the same (Core i7-3520M, 4gb RAM, Windows 7 pro). They also all have the Intel Centrino Advanced-N 6205 wireless card. Recently I've had several staff members (12-14 at this point) come to me with their laptops completely frozen. The only fix is to hard power them off by holding the power button down.

After booting up the computer and looking in Event Viewer I noticed that Event ID 5060 is spammed 2 to 3 times per second for a couple minutes right before the PC locks up, as you can see in the image below:

The Description for this ID is:

"The description for Event ID 5060 from source NETwNs64 cannot be found. Either the component that raises this event is not installed on your local computer or the installation is corrupted. You can install or repair the component on the local computer.

If the event originated on another computer, the display information had to be saved with the event.

The following information was included with the event:

\Device\NDMP5

Intel(R) Centrino(R) Advanced-N 6205

The specified resource type cannot be found in the image file"

In general it seems like they are only freezing when users are connected to the 5Ghz wireless band (rather than the 2.4Ghz band). I've spent countless hours on the phone with dell "troubleshooting" this issue. I've used multiple versions of the 6205 driver (v. 15.3.1.2 and v. 15.9.1.2). I've uninstalled the device and re-installed it several times. I've even completely wiped out the computer and installed a fresh copy of Windows. Dell seems to think it is a hardware issue and is Hell-Bent on replacing wireless cards and motherboards, but I find it hard to believe that the same hardware issue would strike all these machines at the same time.

Is there a known issue with the Centrino Advanced-N 6205 card/driver and 5Ghz band wireless networks?

Thank you for the help.

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Jose_H_Intel1
Employee
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I am sorry for the inconvenience.

Based on the information you provided the driver version 15.9.1.2 corresponds to our latest package 16.1.5 for Windows* 7. I may suggest the version 16.1.1 for this particular scenario.

http://www.intel.com/support/wireless/wtech/proset-ws/sb/CS-034041.htm Intel� PROSet/Wireless Software; Intel� PROSet/ Wireless Software Downloads

Is this issue happening across different models of access points or security settings? It is also a good idea to update the firmware.

Please let me know if the issue persists.

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RS16
Beginner
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Thank you for the response and sorry it took so long for me to get back to you.

We have a SonicWall 3500 NSA with about 25 SonicPoint AP's and they are all the same.

I'm going to try installing the driver version you suggested (16.1.1) on a couple laptops to see if this solves it. I will respond later with the results after some testing. Thanks for the help.

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RS16
Beginner
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OK, I installed driver version 16.1.1 on a couple different laptops as you recommended. I have not had a problem with those machines locking up since. I'm going to downgrade the rest of the machines to that driver and see how it goes. It looks like you have solved my problem, though. Thank you.

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RS16
Beginner
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I have bad news. I tested the driver version 16.1.1 which corresponds to dell's version 15.9.0.5 on 2 laptops and couldn't get the freezing problem to happen again. I rolled it out to all 70 of our laptops (all the same model) and the problem is occurring all over again. I have no idea what to do at this point.

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