ASUS PCE-AC68 Blue Screen of Death

Since building a new computer, my Windows 10 installation would sometimes crash. The error reported on the blue screen of death would always be page fault in nonpaged area. Interestingly, the system would be fine for months and then suddenly crash a few times per day — always when using Deluge, a torrent client. After some testing, it turned out that downloading a torrent with Deluge would reliably crash the system within an hour.

Debugging the crash minidump with Windows Debugger (WinDBG), it turned out the driver bcmwl63a was likely at fault. This driver is developed by Broadcom for 802.11 wireless network adapters. The driver was being used for my ASUS PCE-AC68 network adapter.

I was using version 7.35.338.0 of the Broadcom drivers for the adapter, supplied through the ASUS product utility version 2.1.1.5 that is available on the ASUS support website. The issue can be fixed by upgrading to version 7.35.351.0 of the Broadcom drivers, which ASUS supplies in version 2.1.4.3 of their utility. The issue can likely also be fixed by downgrading to version 6.30.223.228 (utility version 2.0.8.8), but I have not tested this. See this thread for more information.

First uninstall the old driver through Windows Device Manger (and uninstall the utility through the Control Panel, if installed). Then, instead of installing the new utility, I would recommend installing only the new driver (supplied in the same zip-file as the utility). This can be done manually in Device Manager by updating driver software for the PCE-AC68. Note that after uninstalling the old drivers, the adapter might show up as an unrecognized device, so be sure to check that if the PCE-AC68 is no longer present in the device list.

 

2 thoughts on “ASUS PCE-AC68 Blue Screen of Death

  1. Thank you for this!
    Have been experiencing all kinds of BSOD`s due to windows choosing the newest driver for this card! No good 🙂

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