[fixed!] WiFi causes BSOD, microphone not working

Hey there. I recently installed Vista and am extremely happy with it - except for two very annoying problems. First, using wireless will eventually crash my system (BSOD), especially if I'm using data intensive applications (like torrents or streaming videos). I've narrowed it down to a driver problem, as everything works fine in Windows XP and Ubuntu. As long as I'm surfing via an ethernet cable, the system remains stable. I've tried numerous different drivers versions (including those I used in XP) to no avail. Is there an alternative?

Secondly, the microphone isn't working when webcam is enabled, although this only happens when the same application is accessing both (like Skype). If I use them separately (for instance microphone in Voice Recorder and camera in VLC), they work fine. It's just frustrating not to be able to do any video chats, as I tend to do that quite often.

Oh, and Vista kept searching for drivers for some 'Unknown device' each time I rebooted. I stopped it and I don't think it's really related.

Does anyone know any solutions to these two (three?) problems? Note that they are completely software related. I've done some tests and tried other operating systems (XP, Ubuntu and Linpus included) and both wireless and camera work fine there. I'd really like to use Vista, since I've paid for it ... Besides, it's quite fast and pretty.

 

Well, it was frustrating, but I managed to fix both my problems:

1. For wireless, I uninstalled the Atheros card in Device Manager and restarted the computer. Then I downloaded the official Acer's driver for XP (they seems to be a subtle difference between Atheros' and Acer's driver, despite them sharing the same name and version number) and forced Device Manager to install that (I didn't use the setup.exe!).

2. For the microphone, I simply uninstalled the sound card drivers and let Windows Update find it's own. Worked like a charm, can't believe I haven't tried that sooner.

In case it helps someone else ...

 

Which version of the wireless driver from Acer are you using?

I'm getting some BSOD's in Vista while doing Windows Update and network file transfers. I'm not sure if it's the wireless driver or not, but it's worth looking at.

 

It seems mic problems are far fewer with vista than with xp or linux. Do many vista aa1 owners have the deaf internal mic problem? If not it might be telling us that the vista software somehow handles the mic better. This in turn may say the deaf mic problem is with the xp or linux os rather than with Realtek. Do you have to go tiny vista to get an aa1 to boot in less than a minute. Assuming the aa1 performs best with tiny vista, do you really miss much over fully bloated vista?

Apparently the preferred way to re-install sw is to let windows find it and install it rather than installing from the setup.exe. However many times xp can't find the software. This is particularly true when the original sw has been removed by control panel, and the new software consists of a package of many files including a setup.exe. Perhaps the new software is compressed in some format that by design can only be released using setup.exe. When you uninstall do you use device manager or the more powerful contol panel.