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#1 2008-04-22 01:38:42

jb
Member
From: Florida
Registered: 2006-06-22
Posts: 466

ndiswrapper literally killed my laptop: story time

Just wanted to let everyone know what happened to my dell m1330 this week in case someone else notices the same behavior on their own system.

Despite the fact that I have an iwl4965, I've been using ndiswrapper for the better part of the year on this laptop just because I was so use to broadcom chipsets, I didn't care to try out the native driver ("if it's not broke" mentality).  It's worked just fine for quite some time...until recently.  For the last week or so, I've noticed that ntos_wq would, on occasion, start taking up a considerable amount of cpu time.  But as long as I restarted my networking when it started acting up, it would fall back in line.  But back on sunday, I left it running on the table while I was out to the rink for a few hours.  When I returned, the fans were at full blast, and top was reporting a load of 4.7 something.  Upon seeing this, I immediately turned it off.

A few hours later, I turned it back on to see if everything was alright.  The random character corruptions made me believe otherwise.  And as the final nail in the coffin, running glxgears hardlocked it.  I would have liked to test this again to make sure it wasn't a fluke, but since then the only thing the laptop would do on boot-up was produce a white screen then slowly fade to randomly-colored vertical stripes.

Thankfully, I still had a couple months left on my warranty, and Dell didn't ask how I managed to give this thing a load so heavy the fans couldn't save it.  They just sent a guy over and put a new motherboard in.

...also I'm now using the iwl4965 driver.  Lesson learned. smile


Edit: And by literally killed, I mean it literally worked it to a fiery death, figuratively... wait wat?

Last edited by jb (2008-04-22 01:43:52)


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#2 2008-04-22 08:03:13

zenlord
Member
From: Belgium
Registered: 2006-05-24
Posts: 1,221
Website

Re: ndiswrapper literally killed my laptop: story time

Damn - also: Hooray for warranty!

But looking at it from a different angle, I cannot stop thinking it is Dell's fault. If you want to use your laptop to compile some large packages, then the laptop would be loaded 100% for several hours or days. The laptop should still be equipped with sufficient fans, no?

Or did Dell sell this laptop with a warning that you cannot use this laptop at full speed for several hours? I don't think so...

Zl.

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#3 2008-04-22 18:24:40

jb
Member
From: Florida
Registered: 2006-06-22
Posts: 466

Re: ndiswrapper literally killed my laptop: story time

Good point.

My concern though would have been if they investigated why Vista's thermal or load sensors didn't slow down the processor down and pulled some sort of sony-esque "our warranty doesn't cover usage cases from unapproved OSes".  And at the time I bought this, they had not yet announced Ubuntu would be available for it.  But that would have been worse-case scenario.


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