tl;dr: my Windows 11 laptop has been crashing a lot in when I am at my workplace and I have reason to believe the problem is some horrid interaction between Bitdefender Total Security and something in the workplace, probably the wifi network. How do I best explore how to fix this, please?
Here's all the detail, in case it matters: I have had Bitdefender TS installed and running for over a year on my Windows 11 laptop. I normally work from home but once a week try to work in a (computer science) lab at my university. However, in June I suddenly found that my laptop would start crashing very frequently while at the university. Over the weeks, I tried working in other places in the uni and the problem persisted, but was never quite as frequent (it could be minutes between crashes) as in the lab. I had a lot of crash reports which I took to our tech team. Over several sessions they poked around in my machine in ways that made me nervous but never really identified the problem. The only thing they said was they thought Bitdefender TS was part of the problem (and then were a bit sneery about me using it, which is why I try to avoid tech teams). I stopped working at uni altogether for most of the last 3 months.
When I worked in the lab yesterday, I tried turning off components in Bitdefender TS and then leaving the machine to watch what happened. After 3 crashes in an hour, I uninstalled Bitdefender TS. I then worked on the machine for hours without a crash. Before I left the lab, I stupidly reinstalled Bitdefender TS. Just as it finished installing, I had a catastrophic crash which, long story short, meant I had to totally reset my machine. Obviously, I don't want to go through that again any time soon.
I wonder if there's a way of working out if there's a setting that I can change, or just switch off when in uni, that can stop this problem. Any suggestions on where to start, please?
