Windows 7 loses connection and freezes once every 10-15 minutes... hel

[Morgawr]

Hello everyone, I'm new to the forums and I was hoping somebody could help me with my Windows 7 issue.

Yesterday I finally decided to upgrade from Vista Home 32Bit to Windows 7 Professional 64bit (yay for my student free copy :D ) and so far it's been a HUGE let down. Some say Vista is slow, buggy and less advanced than 7, however I almost never had problems with Vista and now 7 is giving me a lot of troubles.. but being optimist, as I am, I guess there must be a solution to these, so here I am...

After installing Windows 7, I went to download/install all my important applications, like Windows Live, uTorrent, Avast!, Visual Studio 2008 / 2010 (beta 2) etc etc... however the OS keeps crashing and freezing if going under intensive download or bandwith usage. I'm behind a wireless connection with a Wi-Fi adapter (TG123g model... o.O don't know if it makes sense) and I correctly installed all the drivers, since it's working... and in both Vista and Ubuntu it works perfectly. However here, if I'm doing something intensive, I get disconnected and there is NO CHANCE of getting the connection back unless I reboot. I try to unplug and plug back the adapter, I try to use Windows Diagnostic application for the wireless connection, I try to scan for new connection but NOTHING. It does not detect any wireless connection unless I reboot.

The solution would be to not download anything too intensive.. and that is fine, I understand if I'm going to download more than I can, of course I would get stuck... however that is not the main issue. The problem has started happening even WITHOUT using the internet connection... or like, just while downloading a youtube video... I mean, just a single youtube video freezes my connection. That is not normal, is it?

The weird thing, also, is that this problem happens while installing Visual Studio 2010, or when I try to transfer 2 games (total of 11GB) from my old hard drive to my 1TB new hard drive. The OS freezes and the connection stops working, all the programs crash (even non-network related programs, like Windows Media Player) and the OS is stuck till I either reboot or power off my hard drive... and if I do that, no other program works anymore, can't start new processes and after all I'm forced to reboot.

I tried searching the internet but this issue is really a weird one and I couldn't find anything to relate to.. can somebody help me? I know I haven't been really that clear with this problem, but that is because I'm very confused myself as well... Do you guys know of a way to fix this? If you need additional informations, tell me and I will try to provide with more.

Please help me, as of now, Windows 7 is really unuseable.. I'd rather go on my Ubuntu...

[-pops-]

There is certainly something very amiss in the way you have W7 at the moment. Did you do a "clean" install rather than an upgrade.

W7 differs from previous versions of Windows in that an upgrade from Vista is a recommended procedure so that all, or most, of your settings remain intact.

If my supposition is correct, do you still have a copy or backup of your Vista installation that you can use to get back to your old system and then do an upgrade install of W7?

[Dencandy]

Also, did you check that your computer is actaually capable of handling Windows 7? Because it can be quite demanding in some respects (this is based on what I've read - I don't have W7). There's an upgrade advisery service from Microsoft which potetential users are advised to run on their computer before upgrading. This is the link: UPGRADE ADVISOR. I've no idea if you can run it now, since you've already installed Windows 7...

[Morgawr]

There is certainly something very amiss in the way you have W7 at the moment. Did you do a "clean" install rather than an upgrade.

W7 differs from previous versions of Windows in that an upgrade from Vista is a recommended procedure so that all, or most, of your settings remain intact.

If my supposition is correct, do you still have a copy or backup of your Vista installation that you can use to get back to your old system and then do an upgrade install of W7?

I tried to do an upgrade but it said it was not possible, so I did a clean install... however it was able to keep the files within my C: drive and just move Windows to Windows.old.. so I don't know if it's an upgrade or not...

Anyways sorry for the trouble, I found out how to fix this bug... it was an incompatibility bug with the nVidia chipset bus for USB ports (or something like that) which happens only on a certain type of nVidia chipsets (duh, mine apparently >_>) and only if you have 4 or more GB of ram under a 64bit system. Basically Microsoft released a hotfix patch for Windows 7 but it's not officially released under windows updates because it caters only a certain amount of people (Those with 64bits and 4GB+ of RAM) so they are not allowed to release it to everyone as a public update (or so I read...).

Apparently this bug made USB port fail under "heavy" stress and amount of data, hence why after trying to copy+paste files from C: to an external drive the computer got stuck, or why after loading intensive websites from the internet (through an USB/Wireless adapter) the whole computer froze.

Luckily I was able to find out why because another user had the same problem in the Microsoft forums, else I would've never heard of it... weird... :\

[-pops-]

Please don't apologise for causing trouble.

It was good of you to explain how you overcame the problem.

Your explanation could be of help to others.

[jimv7]

Glad you have fixed your problem, can you post a link to the bug fix so others might benefit.

[andsome]

Welcome to WF. Glad it's all fixed. It's refreshing when some asks a question, and then gives feedback afterwards. You wouldn't believe how many come on here and ask questions, and no one has any ides as to whether the correct solution has been offered or not. Stick around and enjoy looking at my avatar.