Ever have one of those days...

[Zap]

Couple days ago I set up a new computer for my aunt. I built it, and had made sure everything worked.

Hooked it up, and Windows didn't see the WiFi card. Took side panel off to find the PCI card had popped out. Pop it in, and Windows detected it, but wouldn't connect to the router (more on this later). Rebooted, and it no longer detected the drives. Spent a bit of time digging into the hardware and scratching my head. Had an SSD and HDD, but neither was being seen. Reset BIOS and they are seen again. I recover the saved BIOS settings, and it wasn't seen again. Changed the SATA controller on the AMD chipset from AHCI to IDE, and it worked again. Very strange because it was working set to AHCI... until suddenly it didn't.

So, back to having it boot up into Windows all nicely... but it still won't connect to the router. Router was one provided by the ISP (AT&T?) with an SSID of 2WIRExxx where xxx was a number. I checked some neighbors and had the same problem with any SSID with the name 2WIRExxx. The "problem" was that I would click on Connect, and then after a moment it said it couldn't. On any other wireless connection, after clicking on Connect, it would come back asking for the password.

I eventually came upon a "fix" for it. Going into Device Manager > Ralink RT61 Turbo properties > Advanced > Carrier Detect > Enable. WTF? Now, like magic it works on the 2WIRExxx connections.

Was supposed to be a friggin' 10 minute job.

 

[Athadeus]

How'd the PCI card come out in the first place? Cheap case with bad clips?

 

[stahlhart]

That's weird. I have one of those 2WIRE gateways here -- the "day" I had was that when I first set up this new PC I couldn't get the wifi connection to it to persist -- every time I booted up I'd have to reenter the WPA2 password, it would never save it. Eventually it turned out to be the order in which the adapter and the drivers were installed.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Yeah, I've had client jobs like that.

I tried to upgrade my buddy's P4 rig to a dual-core AMD rig. He was running XP, SP2 or SP3 (maybe SP3).

Anyways, I got bit by the INTELPPM.SYS driver. Apparently, this gets installed for Intel rigs, for processor power management, and when you move to an AMD rig, it causes bluescreens.

The fix for it was to boot the recovery console, and type "DISABLE INTELPPM".

Only I didn't know that at the time.

I booted XP and did a repair install (which generally fixes boot-time blue-screens, but NOT THIS ONE).

The first half of the repair install finished, and then... voila, the same blue-screen!

I googled, found out about the IntelPPM.SYS thing, and tried to boot the recovery console, or possibly safe mode, or something, but because I had started the repair install, it didn't want to do that, it wanted to finish the repair install.

So I had to disconnect the new mobo and new hardware, reconnect all the old hardware, let the repair install finish, and then do the "Disable IntelPPM" thing, and then reconnect all the new hardware again. It was a major PITA.

 

[Zap]

How'd the PCI card come out in the first place? Cheap case with bad clips?

It was a Rosewill card that came with a low profile bracket which I had to use because the case only has low profile slots. I guess there was a bit of flex somewhere between the PCB, bracket and case.