BSOD: DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL

cdburke

I’ve been getting this bluescreen error on my laptop a few times now. Fortunately so far it has only happened when when I’m browsing the web or looking through folders, but it’s only a matter of time before it makes the laptop cut out in the middle of my college work. A few weeks ago I tried to update the grapics driver but the AMD installation manager failed and I believe that may have something to do with the problem. Here’s the specs of my laptop:

Dell XPS Studio 16.
8gb RAM.
Intel Core i7 CPU Q720 @1.60GHz.
ATI Mobility Radeon HD 565v

The error is as follows:
DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL

See attached photo of blue screen.

I'd greatly appreciate any help anyone could provide.

Tokyo

Have you tried running a system restore to before you tried updating the drivers?

cdburke

mike_ie wrote: »

Have you tried running a system restore to before you tried updating the drivers?

Yeah, I tried the earliest restore point but to no avail.

Tokyo

Might be going through the obvious here, but have you tried reinstalling the graphics card drivers?? If you have, it may be worth your while putting a copy of bluescreenview on your computer. Future crashes will give a better idea what driver is causing the problem.

cdburke

Please do go through the seemingly obvious, this is unfamiliar territory for me.

Thanks for the bluescreenview link, that's opened up some clues. It's currently highlighting NETw5s64.sys and ntoskrnl.exe, I assume that means I've been falsely accusing the graphics driver?!

Tokyo

Dell laptop, by any chance? [edit] Just saw above that it is

NETw5s64.sys is the Intel wireless driver - try uninstalling the Intel wireless driver that is currently installed and install the latest drivers from the manufacturer's homepage.

ressem

A quick google suggests that the netw5s64.sys file is a part of the Intel Wifi driver suite.

So approaches would be either updating this driver from the Intel site or that of your laptop manufacturer, alternatively uninstalling the driver and allowing windows 7 to try and find a microsoft certified driver using windows update.

johndoe99

did you try and update your Wireless Card too, the image of the BSOD you posted is mentioning "NETw5s64.sys".

DesperateDan

WHat has saved my bacon more than once and I can't recommend it enough is WhoCrashed. It will read the last dump file windows created from the blue screen and tell you precisely why (in english) it crashed. You are missing an updated driver for something, probably the network adapter or something stupid like that.

cdburke

Thanks for the input guys.
Just downloaded Wireless_16.7.0_Ds64.exe from https://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?DwnldID=23491#help and installed it (well I hope it installed, the only response I got from it was a small loading icon that popped up and disappeared within 20 seconds). Retrying the Intel automatic driver detect now tells me it's up to date. Hopefully that should do it. I suppose its now a case of waiting.