Unruly Behavior

Over the weekend, one of my favorite webistes vanished. I couldn't find The Keepers Babe Of The Day. I've been reading it religiously for over 10 years. So, I e-mailed the keep. Evidently, without warning, his ISP went out of business. So he had to move. Here is the new link to The Keepers Babe Of The Day. I've mentioned it here a few times, even had some of my photos posted there, so here once again is a shout out to The Keepers Babe Of The Day webiste.

Labels: babe, keepers, nsfw

Ok, last month I got hit by the Microsoft Internet Explorer Zero Day bug. It might just be a coincidence, it might be the root cause of many of my problems.

Last week my Alienware 51M laptop started having the Wireless NIC fail when it would come out of Hibernate or Sleep mode. The NIC connects, shows the network. If I go to the Command Prompt and run IPCONFIG, everything looks good. But if I try to ping the gateway, I get HARDWARE FAILURE. This happens if I try to ping anything but 127.0.0.1.

Very odd indeed.

The only way to get the NIC back is to reboot. When I reboot, I get the following error in the System Log:

Event Type: Error
Event Source: PSched
Event Category: None
Event ID: 14103
Date: 1/17/2009
Time: 9:22:37 AM
User: N/A
Computer: ALIEN2008
Description:
QoS [Adapter {F4518C6A-2EAD-44DE-9289-0B3C62A42D6F}]:
The netcard driver failed the query for OID_GEN_LINK_SPEED.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.
Data:
0000: 00 00 04 00 02 00 56 00 ......V.
0008: 00 00 00 00 17 37 00 c0 .....7.À
0010: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ........
0018: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ........
0020: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ........
0028: 0d 00 01 c0 ...À

If I follow the link to Microsoft support for this error I get this:

Details
Product: Windows Operating System
ID: 14103
Source: PSched
Version: 5.0
Component: System Event Log
Symbolic Name: EVENT_PS_QUERY_OID_GEN_LINK_SPEED
Message: QoS [Adapter %2]:
The netcard driver failed the query for OID_GEN_LINK_SPEED.

Explanation
This event record indicates a serious problem.

User Action
Contact your technical support group or the Microsoft Product Support Services.

Yeah, go Microsoft, this is a serious problem, but we don't have a solutoin.

So I called Microsoft support and got a far as I could with free support. They told me that they were aware of the problem, and that I should just continue to reboot my machine as a work around.

WTF? It is a laptop, rebooting it over and over kind of defeats the purpose of having a laptop.

I've disabled all power management on the NIC, still no change. I've tried manually turning off the NIC before shutting down, no change. I looked in System Restore, but I don't have a restore point before 1/2009. This is all very infurating.

Anyone else out there have a similar problem, know a solution?

Labels: bad support, microsoft, wireless, zero day