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116431
August 4th, 2009 10:00
Control Panel Crashing While Loading WLAN Utility
On 64 bit Windows Vista Home Premium, the Control Panel will crash during the first time it's opened, Windows Explorer will not respond and is restarted, after that, the Control Panel will load fine until the computer is rebooted.
This behaviour is also observed on 64 bit Windows 7 Ultimate.
I've noticed that during the crash, one icon would not show up, which is the Dell Wireless WLAN Card Utility. I suspected Control Panel has trouble loading this item. The file for this item is BCMWLCPL.CPL
If you remove BCMWLCPL.CPL from the C:/Windows/System32 folder, the control panel will not crash. This file is the Dell Wireless WLAN Card Utility.
If you experience a similar issue, I suggest you move the file BCMWLCPL.CPL to another location and edit the Dell Wireless WLAN Card Utility shortcut provided in your Start Menu to point to the new location.
Dell, please see why Control Panel crashes when loading this file and fix it via an update or patch.
sicinthemind
15 Posts
0
March 17th, 2011 08:00
Hey Mrduc,
I'm a former Dell Support Tech... moved on to new highs... No more call center metrics for me.
I understand your frustration with the Dell Wireless WLAN Card Utility. However, the Utility is not a requirement to operate your Wireless Network Card.
What I might recommend is that you run the latest BIOS update and try again... other then that. It's not really worth the hassle and time to go with the software. As I stated in my previous post. They're good systems, they operate very efficiently... without some of the Dell Wireless Utility. That Utility is the worst next to the Intel ProSet utility for the Intel WLAN cards.
Is it really worth chasing your tail just to get your wireless card to work with that utility? The techs just cannot de-mote the product of the utility itself... so they have to get you to reinstall the OS by itself with the Dell stuff. Which puts you right before the updates. You'll end up calling again when Windows installs all updates and the utility no longer works again.
Just uninstall it. let Windows Manage it.. You are running "Microsoft" Windows 7. Not "Dell" Windows 7. Just because Microsoft changes some things, doesn't mean it was a poorly written program. It just lacked the compatibility for the latest Updates from Microsoft. If Dell were to run an entire enterprise and to keep up with all of the changes Microsoft makes on a monthly basis... Dell would have to be a software company instead of a hardware oriented company. Yes they have some software development teams, but not near the yield that Microsoft has.
That's not to say other utilities don't work... just the Wireless managers are garbage. Only successful wireless manager I can think of is the Cisco Wireless manager.. but there's no missing concept there. Cisco is a networking hardware/software vendor.
Hope that helps.
Best Regards,
Steve K - MCITP, RHCT/RHCSA
mrduc
3 Posts
0
March 17th, 2011 09:00
Thank you for the information.
I already uninstalled almost all of Dell's software earlier today, which caused my laptop to run as expected.
First I wanted to wipe the windows install, and install BSD instead. But I need the windows installation for software development with Windows (some customers want windows only software).
Best Regards
Mrduc.
sicinthemind
15 Posts
0
March 17th, 2011 10:00
Have you ever looked into VMware Player's Unity Mode? It basically minimizes the virtual machine environment and runs like a "remote app" to limit the view to just the application you're running in your virtual machine.
Here's a screen shot I found through a short search for unity mode on Linux.
Vmware Player unity mode running MS Word from Windows on Fedora. Should work the same for the development applications you need.
http://danny.damours.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/screenshot-1s.png
Best Regards,
Steve K. - MCITP:SA, RHCT/RHCSA