Why is it that when a piece of hardware fails, it has to bring a friend? A couple days ago, one of my across-the-street neighbors contacted me. His roommate’s PC was blue-screening repeatedly every time the PC completed the boot process. He goes on to e-mail me some info from the BSOD and informs me that he just updated the Trend Micro PC-Cillin Internet Security software on it when the errors started to occur.

I get the error description and do some quick analysis. As many of you know, BSODs can be caused by any number of things, but they almost always come back to some kind of driver conflict. Sure enough, the file name buried deep in the BSOD text was part of the driver package on the Belkin USB Wireless LAN Adapter. Somehow, that driver was clashing with something in the PC-Cillin software.

I pop across the street to see what I can see in person. I quickly confirm that the Belkin adapter is already running the latest published drivers… but this is a very old adapter (easily 4 years old) that Belkin discontinued some time ago. So rather than try and beat a dead horse, I advise him the easiest thing to do is just get a new USB Wireless LAN Adapter. I print out a couple options from BestBuy.com and he picks one up that evening.

He contacts me the next day to say he’s installed the adapter on his own, but cannot connect it to his Wireless router. So again I pop over to take a look. The good news is that the PC isn’t Blue Screening anymore, but the bad news is it isn’t able to connect to his router. So I go look at the Netgear router, and that’s when things really got goofy.

First off, I had the hardest time accessing the router’s web admin screens… neither Firefox or IE would seem to let me in. So I power-cycled the router and finally was able to get logged in. But wait – when I started to poke around the various setup screens, it would become non responsive again. I finally seemed to get it to a point where I could update the router’s firmware (it was several versions behind), which I hoped would finally resolve the problems.

And things got worse from there – after what I thought was a successful firmware upgrade, the router went completely haywire and decided to be merely a switch. What do I mean by that? I mean it wasn’t doing NAT anymore, it was merely passing through the public IP address of the router. What’s even stranger is that the router wouldn’t even respond to me trying to perform a hard reset. Like I said, it went from being a router to being a switch. Well, perhaps this was a case of hardware empathy, and when the adapter on his roommate’s PC decided to flake out, the router it had formed a relationship with decided it couldn’t live without it and went belly up.

So we got a new D-Link router lined up, and just this morning, I went over there to set it up. This is when I started to think our homes were built over some kind of haunted burial ground. The brand new D-Link router was acting goofy… like restarting itself every 60 seconds. Whoa. So finally, after monkeying around a little more, it seemed to finally settle down. I configured it the with similar settings to the previous router, and it stopped having its little tantrums. Immediately, his roommate’s PC saw the SSID and it got out to the Internet just fine.

But what a weird sequence of events. It’s not the first time I’ve had these quirky things with this particular customer. It’s seems to alway be a battle of wits with the hardware at his house, but once you show the hardware who’s boss, it finally starts to behave. I’m hoping that this latest victory will last a good long while.

[tags]D-Link,netgear,NAT,IP address,firmware,Wireless LAN Adapter,SSID[/tags]