I’m an owners of two IBM Thinkpad; the T40, and the T42, both running on Windows XP. A few days ago both of were experiencing problems with the laptops.
With the T42 Thinkpad, I would lose my wireless connection a few moments after I have turned on the laptop. When I try to ping my router I would get a “Hardware Error” message, and when viewing the Network Connections under Control Panel, the Wireless Connection indicated that it was disabled. An attempt to re-enable the connection would result in the laptop hanging.
The T40 Thinkpad was even worse, as it was haunted by the Blue Screen of Death.The blue screen would appear randomly and very frequently, making it almost impossible to diagnose what was the cause.
It turned out the root case was the drivers for the Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG wireless card, which is the card that was installed on both our laptops.Apparently, the existing drivers which came with the IBM Thinkpad was no longer compatible with newer Access Points (I had also recently change my wireless network encryption from WEP to WPA).I downloaded the latest drivers from, and after installing it, both laptops were working again.
For more information refer to the Intel WiFi Product support page.
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