Dell Xps M1530: Wireless card/Display Driver Randomly stops working

I have recently been having problems with my Dell Xps M1530. Over time, when running, the wireless card will stop working. When this happens, it starts out normal, then the computer will freeze for a few seconds, music playing will begin to loop, and eventually the screen goes black, then comes back on, USUALLY, or sometimes not at all, a pop up tells me that the Nvidia driver has stopped working and has recovered. However, my wireless card randomly stops working after this occurrence. I know this for a fact because the blue light saying "WIFI" turns off and I no longer have a connection to the internet, even though the wireless switch on the side is on. This occurrence usually happens anywhere between 30 minutes to 3 hours, but it has never gone longer than about 3 hours until this happens. I have no idea why a display driver would have anything to do with the wireless card, but it is all linked. Also, kind of a related question, a similar event occurs. It will begin the same way, normal, then will freeze up and then go black, finally returning to the screen. The difference this time is that the screen resolution changes to 1024 x 768 and I cannot change it back to 1280x800. In this separate occurrence, the wireless card stays running, but the display driver stops working, and doesn't fully recover. These two events have been irritating me recently as every time, the only way to stop the problems is to restart the computer. The temperature I know is not a problem either as I have a cooling pad with two fans running underneath the laptop. Does anyone have any ideas as to why this happens?

 

The display driver business is almost certainly indicative of a bad GPU, and on an M1530, that's pretty much to be expected. The WIFI thing may or may not be related... your WIFI card could just be going bad at coincidentally the same time as your GPU, or it could just be Windows doing funny things on the brink of hardware failure.

WIFI cards are cheap; you could try buying a new one to see if it resolves the WIFI issue, but you're going to have to replace the system board to fix the GPU issue eventually...

 

Yea, if I'd have to replace the system board, at that point I'll just buy a new laptop. Is there any way I could diagnose the wireless card and GPU to see if either of them have a problem? If I know that it's not either one, then I would just try re-installing Windows. Especially because I don't seem to have these problems on my Linux partition. But that could just be coincidence.

 

Re-installing Windows should probably be your first action of choice. If that doesn't work, try buying a new WIFI card. If that doesn't work, then it's probably all on the GPU and you should buy a new laptop.

 

I experienced similar problems and my resolution was to move the wireless and bluetooth drivers back to the original Dell one's, windows update had installed later drivers in particular the bluetooth driver cause issues. First indication for me was my bluetooth wireless mouse (using the onboard bluetooth) would cease to function.

 

Most M1530s are ticking timebombs. I had the same issue, which after a few weeks required a system board replacement.