Laptop wireless device problems

I have a Dell Inspiron 5100 Laptop and I recently upgraded from Windows XP Home Edition to Professional. Also, I installed a new hard drive as well. My old hard drive was a Toshiba MK6021GAS 60GB and my new one is a WD Scorpio 80GB. My old hard drive was warped (very old), however, before I changed out the old hard drive I installed XP Professional on it and the wireless network worked just fine. However my hard drive was warped and would not work properly, my computer would just shut down so I had to put in the new hard drive and reload XP Professional, and it loaded just fine. Now everything is working properly, only my wireless network is not being recognized, I went into the device manager and it is not even showing the 1400 TrueMobil Wireless WLAN driver. I know that I need to install the wireless network driver in order for it to work but what do I do if my OS is not even recognizing an internal wireless card. I know I have one because it is what I have been using up till now. HELP ME PLEASE!

 

So have you already installed the vendor provided drivers for the wireless card yet or not? I couldn't tell. Make sure you install all the drivers that the vendor has for this laptop applicable for XP Pro. What works for HE should also work for XP except certain few cases but that should not be the case here. Just make sure you visit Dell's site and look for the latest and greatest chipset + wireless drivers available for this laptop/XP Pro.

 

yeah I have already installed the drivers for XP Professional; however it is just the wireless driver that is not being recognized by the device manager. I have tried reinstalling the wireless driver but nothing. The first time I installed XP Professional, the wireless driver was successful; however, I had to put in a new hard drive due to the fact my old one was old and corrupted, so then after putting in a new hard drive and successfully reinstalling XP Professional I went to Dell's site and installed the appropriate drivers. However, my wireless is the the only one not working. The Operating System is not even recognizing that there is even an internal wireless card in my laptop. If the Operating System was recognizing that there was an internal card installed in the laptop then it should be listed under the device manager with a question mark beside it which would state that it recognizes the card but just not that there is a driver installed for it. That is what I feel is the problem, but if that were the case I don't understand why the Operating System would not be recognizing it. Of course, that may be way off base but I'm open to all ideas right now.

 

Ok, just to be on the same page, Device Manager shows what exactly? Nothing on the wireless card or does it show the card on the list with a yellow exclamation mark?
Since this is an integrated card and the XP is a fresh install, there are 4 logical potential culprit spots (easier to harder):
~ Related Windows Service is disabled/not running (Wireless Zero Configuration).
~ Device Drivers, not installed (if Windows is not able to detect the card from within its own list of preconfigured device drivers, the Device Manager list will not list the item at all or show it as 'unknown'), wrong one is installed or it is a faulty installation (Yellow Exclamation mark in Device Manager).
~ Related BIOS settings, make sure the related settings in BIOS are correct and that the card is not disabled.
~ The card itself is faulty (if all above checks out fine, this just might be the reason).

These are all I can think of.

PS. I mainly work on IBM T series laptops and on T60s (in the front left section) there is a switch to turn the Radio (Wireless) function on and off so make sure your laptop doesn't have some sort of a hard switch like that is somehow disabling it.

 

This is unlikely, but it's a thought... maybe it'll help. Most built-in laptop wireless cards have their own little compartment on the bottom of the laptop, as does the RAM and the hard drive. Do you think that you may have opened the compartment while looking for the hard drive? If so, maybe the card got wiggled lose. If you didn't open the compartment, go ahead and open it and make sure the card is seated firmly, and that the 'antenna' wires (usually a thin black wire and thin white wire) are connected. As suggested above, be sure the card is enabled in the system BIOS. Now, this may sound totally off base... I was recently working on some older Dell Pentium3 laptops. All but 2 showed the on board modem and ethernet adapter listed in the device manager, and I couldn't get the 2 to even recognize the modem or NIC to save my freekin life. I was about to admit defeat, and install PCMCIA cards for the modem/NIC, but before I did that I decided to see if the main battery was holding a charge; it wasn't. I shut down, put a known good battery in, rebooted, and VOILA! there's the modem and the NIC. I'm not sure if this lengthy and tiresome tale helps at all, but what the heck....

hd2k