Asus G73JW Freezes after Windows 8.1 Update - Network Related

I bought a G73JW-A1 for my Daughter thre years ago, not an inexpensive notebook by any means.We have had issues with the G73 on and off, one issue was it got into a loop and wanted to recover /restore / what ever and would not get out of it.  I bought Windows 8.0 and install it and it started again, I finally got it to stop buy disabling "Fast Boot" and have not had that issue in over 10 months now.

Now my Daughter wants me to let her install 8.1, after reading all of this, I don't think so.

My question to all of you Asus G73 owners, why aren't we collectivly getting on Asus case?  I have been using PC's since 1988 and I have never seen such a miserable offering of updates for a product as this??  it's like Asus knows this notebook has issues and they just ignore it.

There is no excuse, asus needs to step up to the plate and take responsibility, this is the second Asus PC box I have purchased in the past several years and if things do not change, it is the last Asus Box.

I haven't done enough testing to nail down the problem yet - if it ever happens again, I'll re-post here with whatever state my computer was in.  Just happy to have a reasonably stable system again.

Well, it happened again today.  I logged in and within about a minute, the entire system froze.  I have not changed anything since last time.  Really, I browse the web with Chrome and play some Steam/Origin games.  I don't think I've even installed anything new since my last post.

I also have not discovered a reliable "fix."  Every time I rebooted, the system crashed about 1 minute after logging in.  So, I mucked with things:  Reenabled Bluetooth in the BIOS, Disabled Bluetooth in the BIOS.  Finally, disabling both Bluetooth and Wired LAN and disconnecting my mouse (no idea which was successful) allowed me to boot without a crash - it's been 5 minutes.  Also, several times in there the Windows Recovery screen popped up, because I have to do a hard reset each time.  I can't "Refresh" since I don't have Windows 8.1 media (?! It was an update from the App Store) and none of the other options were helpful.

So, now I'm running without LAN and Bluetooth and a Mouse.  I'll post this and plug the mouse back in - I assume it will work, it has never been the culprit before.

This seems to start happening every 10-12 days, based on my previous posts.  This leads me to believe that there is some background Windows process that is causing the issue - maybe checking the servers to reauthenticate my Live Password?  And my wireless card is being used before a proper driver loads?  No idea.

The fix still seems to be: "Mess around with networking related BIOS options and pray."

Out of curiousity, I re-installed the outdated Intel chipset drivers and was able to restart my Windows 8.1 machine without it freezing.  However, while checking for Windows Defender updates, it froze again.  Perhaps the freezing on wireless problem is not relegated to just startup and initialization afterall, as I originally thought.  *SHRUG*

By the way, Windows 8.1 is just rife with problems.  As of this morning, I am unable to use Windows Update.  It fails with the dreaded error "Code 80244FFF".  Ugh!

It froze again, but I've been able to regain stability simply by using the built-in Ethernet card.  I did not have to turn off internal networking in BIOS.  The wireless card truly does seem to be the problem.

I would like to point out that it worked fine in Windows 8 Professional x64 up until this mid-December.  After I had reset my system (to reinstall Windows 8) and updated to Windows 8.1 Professional x64, the wireless worked fine for a while with the optional Windows update for the Qualcomm wireless ethernet driver.  The freezing happens early in the startup process, sometimes as early as the screen with the spinning circle, and sometimes as late as after the Windows desktop/Start screen has come up and then you attempt to do something.

My hunch is that Microsoft has changed the way Windows Startup/Initilaization works such that the wireless networking does not get properly initialized -- this would explain why the wireless driver used to work fine without freezing.  The wireless driver must have been designed to work under certain assumptions that no longer apply anymore.  The change in Startup/Initialization for Windows could be due to a security fix or as part of some Windows enhancement (such as to the Windows Store).

Still, if some networking operation needs to happen during Windows startup and initialization and the wireless network driver is not ready or is frozen, why does the whole OS have to freeze up?  Why can't Windows detect the unresponsive wireless driver and just time-out and report an error?  Even if the wireless driver fails to yield control back to the OS, the OS should still be able to override at the kernel level and retake control of the main thread.

While it is possible that the built-in wireless networking card itself may be failing (it is a couple of years old now), but I doubt it because other folks are reporting that the freezing problem began happening around the same time period: between late November and early to mid December.   It seems too coincidental to me.

Unless this problem manifests itself on other brands/models of machines and wireless network cards, I fear that a solution will not be coming from Microsoft or Qualcomm, because it will be too esoteric of a problem to devote any time/resources to investigating and fixing.

I own the Asus G73JW-3DE and recently began having the freezing problems on December 18th. I had been running Windows 8 Professional for almost a year with no major problems. On December 18th, a notification appeared on my screen right after sign-on to let me know that the Windows 8.1 update was available in the Windows Store. I had never been prompted before about the Windows 8.1 update before, so I was wondering if some recent Windows update had been installed to encourage me to update (I had the "automatically download and install Windows Update" setting turned on). I tried to invoke the Windows Store but it was not working because the WSService was disabled (I think I had manually applied some tweaks to shut off). My Avast! antivirus had updated recently and it was now suggesting that I update Adobe AIR and the VLC Media Player, so I did that.

I later had to go out, so I closed the cover on my laptop and left. When I returned home, I flipped the cover back up, but Windows would not resume, so I held down the power button and restarted the laptop. It booted up, but shortly later it froze. I held down the power button and restarted again. After a few failed attempts, Windows automatically brought up Recovery mode. The "automatic repair of Windows start up" was unable to fix the problem, so I used the System Restore to undo the latest Windows updates, Adobe AIR, VLC Player, and Avast! antivirus program update. The system booted up this time and I figured it was a problem with the antivirus program, so I installed AVG Free antivirus instead. I re-applied Windows updates and noticed that the Windows 8.1 update notification appeared again. Well, the freezing problem came back with a vengeance, and I could no longer get Windows to come up, except in Safe Mode. I noticed that the freezing occurred in Safe Mode as well if "With Networking" was enabled and I was using WiFi. Networking did work fine if I used the built-in ethernet card instead.

However, I ran into a strange problem if I pulled out the ethernet cable while I was in Windows. On the next reboot, I would see an error message "PXE-E01: PCI Vendor and Device IDs do not match" and then Windows would not see the ethernet card anymore (there would be a driver for some Kernel Debug Networking Controller in Device Manager instead); I was only able to make that go away by rebooting the machine with the ethernet cable plugged in and prevent it from happening again by not removing the cable until after Windows had powered down.

I convinced myself that there was a problem with Windows updates, and I just needed to update to Windows 8.1 to get past these problems. However, despite my best efforts, I could not get the Windows WSService to start so I could use the Windows Store to update to Windows 8.1. So I spent the next evening running Windows Reset and re-installed Windows 8. After re-installing Windows 8 cleanly (I reformatted the partition) and installing all of the updates (using the built-in Ethernet network card), I was able to run the Windows Store and update to Windows 8.1. I had to install an optional Windows update for the wireless ethernet card to get it to working in Windows 8.1, but wireless then worked like a charm. I turned off automatic Windows updates, and then created a new Windows Recovery Image and began the arduous task of re-installing my favorite applications.

Everything had been fine until this evening when I started up my computer and saw a message on the login screen that said I needed to install a Windows update, after that, it froze. I held the power button down and restarted, but it kept freezing during the startup process. After going through this annoyance a few more times, Windows went into system recovery mode, and I opted to perform a System Restore to see if an older version of the Windows Visual C++ runtime that was installed this afternoon was causing the problem. Shortly after Windows restarted and displayed the "System Restore has restored your machine to a prior state", the system froze! A few more rounds of holding down the power button and restarting and Windows put me back into Recovery Mode. This time I went into safe mode and disabled the dynamic tick setting with bcdedit, but I think I had already disabled that setting shortly after I installed Windows 8.1.

Well, the Windows did start up and has not frozen yet. I uninstalled the older Visual C++ runtime and also uninstalled/re-installed Sandboxie (it had been giving me problems since Windows 8.1 reported there would be incompatibility problems with the software). Still not confident I had the problem licked, I did a little Google searching and found this thread. Based on my experiences, the WiFi card could indeed be the culprit (it would explain why there are so many freezes at startup with software trying to phone-home to check for new updates. I suppose I could try running with the ethernet cable plugged in to see if that helps.

Is it really necessary to disable internal network cards in BIOS? Let's keep this thread updated as we collectively learn more about this problem.

By the way, while we're talking about Windows 8.x and the G73JW, I had to disable the internal pointing device in BIOS because the touchpad driver was so buggy and unbearable (the mouse pointer would jerk about, be unresponsive, or sometimes wiggle around on its own). Also, the Fresco USB 3.0 port was never reliable for me in Windows 8; my USB 3.0 hard drive would constantly get disconnected, so I had to plug it into the USB 2.0 port instead. Have you folks experienced these issues as well?