New Laptop issue with wireless

[shocky123]

So my girlfriend just got a new Dell Inspiron 600m, got it with basically all options and stuff.. (lightest notebook that met her needs)

So I bought a wireless router for the apartment. (bought I mean free after rebate)
And had been reluctant to properly setup the router until last night, so I did and things are correctly setup on it.

The problem lies with her laptop.. it uses an onboard Intel 8290/8200? 802.11b/g chip for it's WAN access, which appears to work correctly for the most part. I believe she was able to properly connect to another wireless router in the area.
The catch is we need(ed) to setup encryption and whatnot for the router, we did this and everything is fine router-wise. Using WPA? (sorry.. I'm new to wireless.. I prefer 60Gbit Infiniband cables, so I've pushed wireless off as long as possible).. or whatever the password authentication thing is.
However,
Whenever we try to connect to the router, we get a nasty BSOD.

Steps to reproduce problem:
Start the 'wireless connection setup'.
Go through the wizard, setting up everything correctly, entering the password, etc.
Click Finish.
BSOD: driver: cant remember the name offhand.. it's the intel wireless driver though. (this is verified).

Everytime. I google'd it and found that indeed the bsod was telling me it was a driver issue. I updated the drivers for the WAN stuff, and it still does it.

I read somewhere through google that Intel had released some Beta driver for the same chipset that apparently solved the problem. There's always a catch though... Those threads were from like Oct.'04. And the latest driver from intel is dated May'05.

Anyone ever had a similar issue with this? (Intel onboard wireless.. XP sp2 + BSOD)

Thanks in advance,

~Kyle

/edit: sorry mods.. this shoulda been in tech help forum :(

[speedracer120]

Did you try getting the driver from Dell's website? I had a bit of the problem with the driver as well, but no BSOD, simply one of the error dialogues, but even with the error dialogues that popped up, I couldn't connect to my network with WPA Preshared Key enabled. Also, might want to check that the driver doesn't have pre-logon network connect enabled because that seemed to be the culprit for my troubles last night.

[qwilliam]

if you know for sure that the problem doesn't lie with the router, you can try using dell's wireless utility to connect to the router rather than windows built-in wireless network setup wizard. don't know why, but dell loves to use its own utilities/drivers.

[bachviet]

Try WEP first before using WPA. Sometimes the old Intel wireless card doesn't like WPA.

[shocky123]

Tried the Dell driver.. same thing

any other ideas?

~Kyle

[bachviet]

Try to connect without encryption and see if it works first.

[brainsmile]

:stupid: first step is to get connected... make sure you can do so unencrypted and go from there.