The case of fake intex NIC card and the bit torrent .

since last few week torrent file sharing has been a centre of attraction for me.
As I have unlimited internet scheme during night hours only what I have to do is downloading some good torrent files & put them to download over night between 2 am to 8 am & then schedule the bit torrent client to turn off the PC when done or hibernate at 8 am.

few days back my on board lan card started misbehaving & i had to borrow
an additional PCI INTEX RTL8139d chipset NIC, I also had to install an unsigned driver that came with it.

what i noticed is that when ever i would turn on my torrent client, within minutes my pc would automatically reboot as if it was a hard reboot, with out any sort of warning or message & i had to start all over again to get a good speed. not to mention fear of HDD partion corruption.

searching over the net i came to conclusion that the INTEX provided a fake Realtek chip with the card, even though it read RTL8139d
it was confirmed when i booted in Linux & the card detected as that belonging to SILAN from china.

upon more enquiry over the internet I also came to know that these effects were
created as the interrupt for this card was being shared with system bus.
and the driver being unsigned was also a root to the problem.

so the conclusion was as follows,
when my torrent client did an increase in traffic over the NIC card, more number of interrupts were thrown,
the driver being not properly designed must have messed up the thing &
the windows had got some how confused because of high no. of interrupts on the same interrupt.
this all led to driver's crash & the windows XP rebooted without a prompt, posing a danger to my hardware & software at the same time

lesson learnt:

1> don't fall for cheap computer parts.

2> buy genuine hardware at least , if not software :)

3> always back up your PC's important data.

4> Google is the internet god, "Google devo bhava".