A word of warning if updating to newest Intel Wireless Drivers

I was getting a crash on cold boot on my C1 PRO 1080TI the last few times I booted up after shutting down completely.

 

After someone on the MS forums identified the likely culprit from the mem dump file, it said it was an intel wireless driver.

 

I had updated my WiFi drivers from the intel site twice recently...so I did a clean install of the drivers from the Corsair One driver page (they still list the old WiFi Drivers dating back to April 2017), and didn't get a crash the next time I shut down and cold booted the machine.

 

I will monitor it further to make sure it doesn't happen again, but being that this was the first successful cold boot in the last 3-4 attempts, after reverting back to the OEM wireless driver, I think it's safe to assume that the newest intel WiFi drivers don't like my C1 PRO.

 

BTW, it's difficult to tell if your C1 PRO crashes on cold boot...the only sign I had was that the ONE logo wasn't appearing...just the three options in the upper left...and it was taking longer to boot...there was no BSOD even though a BSOD WAS happening (and thus the resultant crash dump files being generated and the messages appearing in Event Viewer).

 

So this might be happening to you and you might not know it.

 

Again, the symptoms were:

 

No ONE logo on cold boot, and no spinning ball...just the three lines of boot options text in the upper left of the screen. Then the screen would go black...and come back with the usual ONE logo appearing (and spinning Windows loading ball) and then it would boot into Windows just fine.

 

Apparently, when the C1 PRO BSODs on cold boot, you don't see a BSOD...it just tries to reboot.

An interesting comment and relevant for the issues I had on my C1:

C1 Pro with 1080GTX and M.2 SSD - mechanical keyboard+mouse.

 

Symptoms

Storage on the M.2 disappearing at an excessive rate, 2-3GB per week. Tracked down to Memory.dmp.

Going into sleep but every couple of days on a keypress doing a warm start rather than waking up.

At the same time program corruption requiring re entry of licence detail/passwords.

Data Loss.

Falling back to default screen resolution - restart to get back to native resolution.

 

To keep this short I did a lot of web searches and hardware tweaks without fixing or identifying a cause for the above. Then opened the event viewer, did a custom filter for sleep/power and found RasMan service errors. More web searches to find that Rasman was set to automatic whereas it should be Manual. There were long delays starting and stopping RasMan so I used Control Panel to remove Remote Access and set the service to manual, which fixed the sleep issues. My WiFi driver is current Intel - v. 20.10.2.2

 

Your bottom line:

'Apparently, when the C1 PRO BSODs on cold boot, you don't see a BSOD...it just tries to reboot.'

Same issue here which I have described as warm boot i.e. power on at mains/PC off when it should be sleeping and my assumption is a BSOD behind the scenes.

I did a cold boot to start the day today, and no crash...booted up super quick with no faults. That's two in a row since getting back to the stock WiFi drivers downloaded from the Corsair C1 driver page.

 

I'm happy I solved my problem in the short term, but wonder why updated Intel Wifi drivers would crash my C1 on cold boot?

 

And most if not all of the drivers on the C1 driver page are pretty dated.

 

Has MSI Live Update for the C1 been updated yet? I'm on 6.1.025 and have never found it to work very well.

The issues which I had all went back to RasMan i.e. a conflict between the service delay and sleep interrupts which then forcibly closed applications that should have retained data in memory. It would appear that Windows now defaults to an always on Remote Access but when that happened is guesswork - could be the Creators or Fall Update? I am running Windows 10 Home, version 1709, build 16299.192.

Is there also a conflict RasMan - WiFi Driver, I just don't know.

 

Whatever the root cause more users than just us two must be seeing these same issues. Having an always open Remote Access is a security risk and on that alone should be turned off until required.

 

*Edit

I uninstalled the current Intel WiFi driver and reverted to the Corsair download version - the Intel installer sets RasMan to Automatic-Running by default.

Just a quick follow up...haven't had a single problem on cold boot since reverting back to the old WiFi driver...for whatever reason, the newest Intel Wifi driver causes my C1 Pro to crash on cold boot, generating a mem dump and a bug check in event viewer (IE BSOD without actually seeing a BSOD). After a cold boot crash, it would try and reboot and everything would be AOK. Restarts were AOK as well. Just cold boot was deadly until I reverted back.