PCI help please

Hi,

I am rehabing a Dell Inspiron 5100 laptop for my daughter. I did a refomat and reinstalled the drivers for I do believe everything. The disk was less than helpful. My problem lies with the PCI slot. This laptop does not have an onboard wireless connection so we used a linksys wireless G notebook adapter, wpc54G ver. 2 in the past to connect to wireless connections. The problem is that I put the card in the PCI slot, install the software and low and behold there is no power to the card. I need to find if the pci slot has been disabled and for the life of me I cannot find the pci in the bios, in the system information NO WHERE! But I swear I saw it once last night when digging in a stupor and I swear I saw it say disabled. So any ideas where I can find the little bugger so I can enable it?

I have no clue what motherboard it has. I am begining to hate manufactured computers.

 

It is most likely a driver contained within the chipset driver pack from the manufacturer.
Does it show the linksys wireless G notebook adapter, wpc54G ver. 2 as connected or installed in the hardware manager?

And wow 437 different drivers for the 5100- that will confuse anyone..

http://search.dell.com/results.aspx...ra=False&~srd=False&ipsys=False&advsrch=False

 

the card shows up in the device manager as an other device,network controller, with a question mark and an exclaimation mark over it. If I click on properties it says - drivers are not installed yet I installed and uninstalled it a half a dozen times to no change.

I had to dowload the driver and software from Linksys because some how somewhere it vanished into the ether. The one I downloaded is the one that they say it matches, I am now having doubts.

I will try again.


Thanks

 

I got WPC54v2_40826