A BIOS upgrade to a Dell laptop has caused instability in the laptop's wireless adapter. I would like to understand what this implies a the hardware level, and what (if any) hardware changes might fix the problem. (Dell doesn't seem interested in fixing the BIOS.) My lack of understanding of computer architecture is getting in the way.

Details:

• In early 2021 my wife's laptop was dying. We got a Dell Inspiron 17 - 3793 as a replacement. All was well for many months.
• In Nov 2021 (I think) a BIOS upgrade was included in Windows maintenance.
  (I shortly thereafter disabled getting BIOS maintenance that way ... but I don't remember how.)
• In Jan 2022 I noticed that all weekly Macrium Reflect image backups in December had failed. Daily file & folder backups succeeded.  Reflect logs showed that all image backups had died with a network failure. By manually running some I discovered that the wireless adapter would go disabled sometime during the backups - sometimes immediately; sometimes after many minutes.
• I tried the newest driver plus a couple old ones. That did not work.
• I eventually went back to the old BIOS and everything worked again.
• There have been 10 BIOS upgrades since the one that came with the laptop. I tested 9 of them and all had the problem.
• External (USB-attached) wireless adapters have no problem, regardless of the BIOS level.

I eventually found a couple other things that would kill the wireless adapter. Copying a large VeraCrypt container or a large encrypted .vhd to a NAS (or to a shared file on another Windows computer) will cause the adapter to die. I think the problem is provoked by sending any large stream of unblocked data. It could be that the adapter overheats, but for the life of me, I can't think of how a BIOS change would cause or prevent that overheating.

And throw in a complication, there was a firmware upgrade to the Intel Management Engine (whatever that is) that went along with at least some of the BIOS upgrades so I suppose this could be a problem with the IME instead of BIOS.


I obviously could stay with the working BIOS, but Dell has been cranking out BIOS upgrades about every 2 months. I assume some of the upgrades might be important so I'd rather not stay that far back-level.

So now to my actual questions. I don't understand how a BIOS change effect the behavior of a wireless adapter in this way. Is it possible this is really a change to PCIe behavior? (The adapter plugs into an M.2 slot.) If so, the change doesn't seem to effect NVMe "disk".

The adapter could be bad; I could try replacing it.
The adapter is a Qualcomm QCA9377 but the doc claims it has an Intel 9560NGW; I could try the Intel card.
But if the problem is with the PCIe interface neither of those solutions will work.
I just don't know enough of how this works to come up with a solution. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

BTW, I've been working with (or perhaps against) Dell support for months but have gotten nowhere.

BTW #2, somewhere in this history there was an upgrade from Win10 Pro to Win11 Pro. That had no effect.