USB pen drive interferes with wireless NIC?
 

Booted into XP today for the first time for a while. I needed to access some Excel files on a USB stick.

First thing that I noticed was that my wireless connection from my Belkin NIC kept dropping every minute or so.

When it happened, the 'Connected to:' entry in the wireless utility status window briefly changed to 'NDIS NOT SUPPORT' before the connection to the router dropped completely.

As the only thing that I could think had changed since last time I'd been in XP was the USB stick, I unplugged it & the problem went away...

The wirelss NIC is a PCI card, not USB so I can't understand why this should be a problem. Anyone come across this before?

Re: USB pen drive interferes with wireless NIC?
 

Maybe the USB host controller is malfunctioning?
Possibly?

Re: USB pen drive interferes with wireless NIC?
 

Could also be Power related as both those devices will draw a lot of power from the USB controller, try a different controller if you have one or an external powered USB hub.

Re: USB pen drive interferes with wireless NIC?
 

The NIC's a PCI card, the only other USB device I had connected was the printer & that was switched off...

I'll try the USB stick in Linux to check if it's a hardware thing...

Re: USB pen drive interferes with wireless NIC?
 

Doh, my bad, missed that in your first post...

Sorry then - not ideas mate, good luck.

Re: USB pen drive interferes with wireless NIC?
 

Tried it in Linux & connection is rock solid with the USB stick in the same port...

This is very strange!

Re: USB pen drive interferes with wireless NIC?
 

irq conflict? does this happen if you use a different usb port maybe on a different hub ie rear of case instead of front

Re: USB pen drive interferes with wireless NIC?
 

I don't have any USB ports connected at the front, but plugging into an alternative port at the back gives the same problem.

Two USB controllers show in Device Manager, one generic & one Via. Both use IRQ 21 while the NIC is on IRQ 17...

Re: USB pen drive interferes with wireless NIC?
 

IRQ Conflict... On Windows XP...?

Re: USB pen drive interferes with wireless NIC?
 

Yeah?

It depends on what HAL you use i think. But the architecture still only allows a maximum IRQ of 15. All >15 are virtual and map originally back to the 1-15.

This is the main reason why I still prefer to set the ACPI PC HAL not the Acpi Uniprocessor one. (Use of, or otherwise, virtual IRQs)

Re: USB pen drive interferes with wireless NIC?
 

Is there any way of seeing what they map back to, so I can check if there's a conflict?

Re: USB pen drive interferes with wireless NIC?
 

You could always check the BIOS? Other than that it's the OS that defines the vIRQs so i'm not entirely sure.

Having a look around they seem to usually map back to 9, 11 or both.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q170922/
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314068/EN-US/