Stumbled on this freezing bug report for ndiswrapper on Dell laptops with Broadcom wireless hardware. The suggestion made in the report fixed this longstanding issue for me! Woohoo! Basically you need to config the BIOS POST to do a “thorough” instead of the default “minimal” check. It will add a couple of seconds to the boot time but it defintely fixes all the annoying hangs when loading the ndiswrapper (fingers crossed). Tested with ndiswrapper 1.2pre CVS.
Update: after 3 weeks of heavy wireless usage I can definitely say this fixes the crashing as the wireless connection has been rock solid! Not a single hang/crash.. Weeh!
Wow.
You actually think this is a "fix".
I belive the correct term is "work around", but I prefer "hack".
It "fix"ed my problem, but "work around" is a better term indeed. Upgrading to the A13 BIOS might have fixed things for real btw, should test it.
What INF file did you use to install this wireless card in ndiswrapper in the first place? The Dell website gives their name for the card, not the lspci name!
Thanks, Tom
The bcmwl5a.inf file
-andy