I've got a laptop running Vista 64-bit. It's a Dell Inspiron 1720. The
built-in network controller is identified as a "Braodcom 440x 10/100
Integrated Controller." (I believe Broadcom BCM4401 is the more specific
device name.) That this brand new, higher-end laptop did not come with a
gigabit ethernet controller gives me the irks, but, I have what I have.
I've seen several laptops and even desktop motherboards with this
controller, so I believe it is reasonably wide-spread and thus hopefully
someone will be able to comment on my issue.
From time to time, the thing just quits working. All traffic stops, I can't
ping anywhere, do DNS queries, release/renew my DHCP lease, etc. To get it
to work again, I can just go to the device manager and disable/enable the
device. Since this never happens with my wireless card, I am reasonably
certain that the fault is in the device driver (or maybe the device itself).
This happens randomly. Typically, maybe once every two weeks, so it's not
too big a deal. However, that's under normal use (web and e-mail traffic
and so forth) - - if I am ever transferring a few GB of data over the
network for whatever reason, this problem is almost sure to come up and
interrupt my transfer, making it somewhat frustrating.
I've tried the stock Vista driver, the latest driver from Broadcom's site
(4.60), and the archived driver from Broadcom's site (4.47), and under all
of them I have had this problem. (I have not found any other 64-bit drivers
to try.)
I let it sit for a while, just dealing with the problem, thinking it was
some obscure configuration issue on my part. However, when I reinstalled
Windows this past weekend and this problem reared its head again right away
(while I was restoring files over the network) using the stock Vista
drivers, I threw up my hands and here I am.
Here's the kicker. I picked up a 4-year-old Inspiron 5150 with the same
network controller. After loading (32-bit) Vista on it, I was able to
produce this problem there too. Though it took me a while to get it to
happen, but after highly utilizing the network controller for a while I saw
the same behavior - traffic stopped until I disabled/enabled the device. I
never saw this on an XP machine with this controller, and since I've seen it
on two Vista machines now, I am leaning towards blaming the newer drivers or
some odd Vista-ism in the way that Windows deals with this device.
(Unfortunately, I do not have long-term access to this older machine, I
should have thought to try some really old XP-era driver from Broadcom and
see if the problem was reproducable there. However, I can't use an old
driver on the 64-bit machine because they simply don't go back very far.)
So, my question is, does anyone else run Vista on a machine that still has
one of these 440x controllers? Have you seen this issue or do you have any
ideas for me to try?
Thanks for any insights you can offer.
--
- Aaron
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