Bad bad wireless card...

Hi. My friend has a Toshiba Satellite M45-s265. It is exhibiting strange behavior. When he has his wireless card turned on and is surfing the web the computer will often lockup and or the wireless signal will be lost, and then often refound again. It seems that it always eventually, within 15 minutes, will lock up. By lock up I mean system freeze, only antidote is rebooting by pressing the power button. He told me that once he got a blue screen rather than it simply locking up in the middle of what he was doing. When connected via hardwire to the internet (with the wireless card shut off via a switch on the front of the computer), there is no problem. This problem started occurring less than 1 week ago.

I suspected perhaps it was overheating so I download speed fan (while hardwired) to try and get a view of what the temperatures were doing. When I tried to run speedfan i also got a system lockup, whether connected normally or wirelessly.

I managed to download, install and run defraggler. Disk fragmentation was reported at 21%! This I left running overnight as I had to go home and sleep.

He reports to me that defragmentation went off without a hitch.
From the previous information I can point out two things. Obviously with a 21 percent fragmented hard drive he is not keen at all on what i would consider normal computer maintenance. Secondly that this doesn't seem to be a heat related issue as the defragmentation had his cpu running between 70 and 100 percent for a very long period of time.

I am wondering what my next course of action should be. Does anyone know if this is a hardware issue? Or software/driver issue? Virus?

Thanks in advance

 

Is this the laptop in question

http://www.amazon.com/Toshiba-Satellite-M45-S265-Processor-SuperMulti/dp/B0009XHPTM

If so, then it has the following wifi card

Built-in Intel Pro/Wireless 2200BG 802.11b/g LAN (scroll down the page above but also check this in Device Manager)

In the first instance, is your friend running WZC (wireless zero configuration) or the Intel software for the wifi card.

What version XP and SP does he have?

The way I would go about determining if this was a hardware problem, would be to use a Linux Live cd and configure the wifi card. If it works under Linux then it's software related. The Intel Pro/Wireless 2200BG does work natively in Linux as I have a laptop with Linux and have that wifi card. If you are willing to try the Linux Live cd option, then go for Puppy Linux (small download 100mb and reasonably easy to configure)

Good Luck