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masalazarvega's avatar
masalazarvega
Copper Contributor
Sep 04, 2026

NETIO.SYS

Good afternoon. I have a Lenovo ThinkPad T16 laptop running Windows 11 25H2, but recently it has been showing frequent Blue Screens of Death (BSOD) with the stop code `DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL (...
device management
Jamony's avatar
Jamony
MCT
Sep 05, 2026

You are seeing repeated DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL (0xD1) crashes on a ThinkPad, and netio.sys appears in the stop code. That file is part of Windows networking, so it is usually where the failure surfaced, not proof that netio.sys itself is the faulty component. The useful next step is to identify the non-Microsoft network, VPN, endpoint-security, filter, Wi-Fi, Ethernet, or dock driver active when the dump was written. Install BIOS, chipset, Wi-Fi, Ethernet, and dock updates only from Lenovo, then temporarily remove third-party VPN or network-filtering products rather than replacing system DLLs. Check Reliability Monitor and Event Viewer around each crash, and compare the latest minidumps with WinDbg’s !analyze -v output. If the same third-party driver recurs, update or remove that product. Driver Verifier can expose a bad driver, but enable it only for selected non-Microsoft drivers and create a restore point first; it can deliberately trigger more crashes.