Hello Mark and thank you very much for your attention.

I tried playing with the settings but the only one that seems to make a difference is interrupt moderation and it is already set to the maximum.

The problem does not disappear if I disable and the reenable the card in Device Manager. To be precise it does disappear while the card is disabled but it comes back right away when the card is enabled again.

The only way to fix the problem is to reboot. Then everything works fine until the computer goes to sleep and is woken up from sleep.

Somehow the card does not properly wake up from sleep but I don't know if it is a pure software issue or rather a firmware issue. I googled quite a bit over the last few days and found numerous people complaining about the Intel 82562V-2 not properly resuming from sleep under Windows 7 but some eventually found out that playing with the speed setting solved their issue. I seem to have a different issue.

Dell support so far is not very useful so that would be nice if Intel and I could troubleshoot the problem together. If there were a way to enable some form of logging or if you had a debug version of this driver that could generate a log I would gladly take the time to help you pinpoint the issue.

Again, thank you.

Hi Mark

I contacted Dell but so far they are refusing to help stating that upgrading the OS voids the software warranty. The computer is still under hardware warranty but Dell claims (so far) that this issue is not covered under the hardware warranty.

I tried 3 drivers: the latest Intel driver from your website, the driver that ships with Windows 7 RTM and the latest driver for Vista from Dell. I experience the problem with all 3 drivers under Windows 7.

Since disabling and enabling again the card in Device Manager does not solve the problem, I end up with the conclusion that after resuming from sleep the card is not correctly reinitialized and remains in a unstable state where it appears to work fine to the driver even though it is generating too many system interrupts. I do not know however if the culprit is the firmware of the card, the BIOS of the computer, the driver or Windows 7 itself. What I know is that the Vista driver is working fine under Vista.

Wikipedia states that Vista uses NDIS 6/6.1 and Windows 7 uses NDIS 6.20. Could this have an impact?

Would you have a tool to reset the card at its lowest level while Windows is running? If not, is there a way to set the interrupt moderation to a level higher than extreme, maybe by setting a registry key?

Thank you!

Hello Mark and thank you for your reply.

Disabling interrupt moderation has an effect but it is negative: it uses even more cpu.

Enabling interrupt moderation and setting it to adaptive or extreme has a positive effect: at least I can use what is left of one core to browse the tech forums ;-)

I was hoping that there could be a even-stronger-than-extreme setting to minimize the problem further.

If the problem is not driver related, would it be BIOS-related?

Unplugging the cable does not make a difference.

In the Windows Event log I see that Windows is unhappy about not being able to configure IPv6 but I don't think there is any relationship to the problem. Anyway I now have disabled IPv6 and the problem is still here.

Sincerely,

G

OK. Thanks.

Dell finally confirmed that they cannot help me with this particular issue but that they plan to support Windows 7 on the Inspiron 530 and that I should check their website again in a month. I hope that validated BIOS and drivers will help. I will post back here if it does (or not) .