Windows 8.1 BSOD: netwlv64.sys

Ping to the router is normal (1ms)

Ping to google or my isp isn't great (approx 90ms) but then my dslam is far from my home so this looks normal.

From my wired ethernet connextion, ping is 30ms lower.

It doesn't vary when resuming from standby or when on battery. The box to allow the computer to turn off the device to save power is unticked.

I'm going to tick it to see if it changes anything.

As far as I'm concerned this problem is solved (Dell Inspiron 1720 x64 - Win 8.1).

Explain the procedure to test wifi quality and I'll be ready to run those tests for you.

As written already you might open Command-Prompt:

Win+X, launch command prompt (no need for admin)

Then type "ping -t 192.168.1.1"

Assuming 192.168.1.1 is your router IP address, you might find your router/gateway address by typing "ipconfig" on the command line too.

Alternatively just type "ping -t www.google.com" to ping google. However this requires a working internet connection and varying ping-times might occur depending on your Internet connection quality.

Then watch the output for timeouts. The output should look similar to this:

Reply from 192.168.1.1: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=63

Reply from 192.168.1.1: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=63

Reply from 192.168.1.1: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=63

Reply from 192.168.1.1: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=63

Slight fluctuation in "time" is possible but on LAN/WiFi interface it should not exceed 10ms. If you ping google the value might be between 20ms and 60ms usually.

Test this after reboot, after standby and on battery.

I am at home right now and pinging my router seems to be more stable than at work. This might be partially related to WiFi band overload at work - perhaps the driver just handled it badly. But also here I get occasionally high RTT (time) values. I will monitor again in crowded WiFi network and perhaps let it run for a day or more to watch for more BSOD.

Right now it looks like outdated 12.4 driver is at least more stable. But other issues of Windows 8.1 are a complete no-go too. It looks like it's at least not worth the hassle. If this thread helps somebody with only WiFi issues and nothing else to fix it then it's fine however. Just keep in mind that you might have to disable power management of Wifi driver in device manager and depending on issues (like standby-resume connection) disabling MSI and even 802.11n mode on 4965agn driver might be required.

Explain the procedure to test wifi quality and I'll be ready to run those tests for you.

Hi, I've had the same issue with this since the upgrade to Windows 8.1 on my lenovo T61 with this wifi adapter.  With Windows 8, it happened very rarely.  One thing I've noticed is that it consistently happens when I am using IE11.  I have NEVER had it happen with Firefox.  It happens every other day right now, so I'm going to just use firefox exclusively and see if that helps.  I'll try and remember to post again later on how it's going :)

I am sorry to say but the browser you are using is extremely unlikely to have an influcence on the BSOD issue. Browsers are user-level applications and just use high-level communication libraries provided by the OS. A browser or any other application is usually unable to write to memory segments in the kernel or driver space in order to cause a crash. Except of course for seriously buggy libraries like it happened for Safari once causing BSOD; but actually also here it wasn't Safari to be the guilty one as it just used OS libraries to draw elements and this library was broken.

In this case here it's clearly the WiFi driver which is faulty or the kernel itself interacting with the driver. There is nothing an application like IE or Firefox can do about it.

I was having my Windows 8.1 running this afternoon. Good news is with driver 12.4 it did not BSOD. Bad news is that I noticed to lose my RDP, VNC and SSH connections every couple of seconds. Tracinb packages show that with driver 12.4 I get extraordinary high packet loss. I was trying a continuous ping on my local WiFi router (ping -t 192.168.1.1) and ping times varied between <1ms and >2000ms randomly with occasional timeouts. Sometimes timeouts for periods longer than 20s which could cause timeouts in connections. So likely driver 12.4 might not BSOD but definitely does not provide stable connections. Perhaps sufficient for short-lasting connections (IM, web browsing, DNS lookup) but certainly not usable for longer sessions.

Perhaps I am the only one with this issue as Coincoinlapin seems to be happy with old 12.4 driver. Or he just didn't realize that the connection is very unstable and drops packets every now and then. As said for pure web-browsing it might be sufficient, some pages might just take longer to load occasionally.

Really frustrating situation overall. Even worse Microsoft (customers of mine having the same issue) keeps telling me I have to buy a new office since Office activation is bound to the machine as well and you cannot simply re-install it after setting up Windows 7 from scratch.

Hi, I've had the same issue with this since the upgrade to Windows 8.1 on my lenovo T61 with this wifi adapter.  With Windows 8, it happened very rarely.  One thing I've noticed is that it consistently happens when I am using IE11.  I have NEVER had it happen with Firefox.  It happens every other day right now, so I'm going to just use firefox exclusively and see if that helps.  I'll try and remember to post again later on how it's going :)

Rob