I spent three hours on the phone with Dell tech support on Saturday. Why? Because my wife discovered that her new notebook was bluescreening itself to death every time she tried to send an email. I tested it a few times myself and discovered that, without exception, sending email was impossible. Windows XP would BSOD every single time. And in my experience, it takes a lot to make WinXP bluescreen. A lot more than any prior version of Windows, at least. Something was definitely going on. I suspected it was something to do with the wireless connection, because email had worked fine while the system was networked via RJ-45 hard wire.

So after scanning the Dell forums for advice, I found a whole bunch of other people with the same problem. What’s funny was that everybody’s machine was crashing at a different time—for some people, it was when they visited a web page with a Java applet embedded in it. For others, it was during an attempt to open a telnet connection. For me, it was email. But the common denominator was the hardware configuration and the BSOD error message. Everyone’s bluescreen mentioned a driver file related to the Intel PRO/Wireless network card.

To make a long story short, after three hours of talking to a very pleasant but apparently scripted Indian fellow via Dell’s tech support, I discovered something that I had begun to suspect before I even dialed the 800 number: Intel’s drivers are crap.

After uninstalling/reinstalling the wireless software and drivers, taking out and replacing my RAM sticks one at a time, pulling out the battery and pushing the secret “system reset” button, guess what eventually solved the problem?

TURNING OFF WPA SECURITY ON MY ROUTER.

WPA authentication is one of the latest methods for securing your wireless LAN. It’s much more effective than WEP, which is just a data encryption method that uses 128 or 64 bits and isn’t too hard to crack. Unfortunately, Intel’s bullshit drivers do not allow me to use WPA without causing a buttload of errors. Great! So much for trying to be safe and secure!

So, I decided I would have to downgrade to WEP security instead. I tried WEP 128-bit, the best WEP method available. Except that didn’t work EITHER. The notebook could not pull a valid IP address in WEP-128. It kept pulling some crazy address that isn’t even on my subnet. I downgraded security again to WEP 64-bit, and that worked. Lovely. The weakest security protocol I can support, and it’s the only one Intel’s shabitudinal software will allow me to use.

Fortunately, my router also includes a MAC filter which allows me to prevent any computers except my wife’s notebook from getting on the network, WEP key or no. So that’s good at least. I’m not up on the technologies used by hackers or wardrivers to intercept wireless communications, but if signals between our notebook and router were able to be intercepted, 64-bit encryption isn’t that hard to crack if someone were determined enough. However, in southwest Florida, people are too busy calling the police on the teacher of a film study class, so I doubt I have much to worry about.

Still, it pisses me off that because Intel is a bunch of fucking morons, I can’t use the best methods available to protect my network. I tried to complain to Intel about this, but all of the contact methods I could find on their website delivered me to an automated response system which no human being is monitoring—even the support request submission form is simply scanned by a (rather dimwitted) text processor, after which it emails you links to tech support articles that might be relevant. In my case, I received notice that the processor “couldn’t understand my question,” and I was given no other options. Wow. How useful.

So much is being made in the news these days of people who don’t secure their wireless networks. Well, with driver support this lousy, it’s no wonder! Needless to say, this incident reminded me of why I use AMD processors in my desktop machines. Whether or not Intel knows how to make a good processor, as a company they’re a bunch of morons.