tabath Posted May 16, 2006 Share Posted May 16, 2006 I know this board isn't really a "hardware I got a problem please help me " type of board but I have so please help me.hehe My dell inspiron 1300 laptop which I have had for 3 months now has been running fine -cnnecting to my 3com officeconnect wifi router with no problems and even pickiing up a neighbours wireless connection quite accidently - I must remeber to tell him to stop using WEP encrytion! Anyway a couple of days ago i stopped being able to connect wirelessly to my router or indeed see my neighbours connection either. I assumed it was a hardware problem with the card which is a mini pci card. I ran the dell diagnostics on the card and it says all is fine with it! I then did the following Reinsgtalled the drivers for the card - still didn't work Checked my router and updated the firmware - the router works fine. Googled for any known porblems and solutions for this card - no help there. I did install vmware player about 3 weeks ago but it hadn't caused any problems at all - anyway I uninstalled it to make sure. Still no wifi connection. I am running win xp and it reports no problems with the device in device manager. It just won't connect to my wifi router. Any suggestions please? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
barrytone Posted May 16, 2006 Share Posted May 16, 2006 The usual stuff is all I can suggest, I'm afraid... Check the laptop with a wireless pcmcia card if you can, make sure it's not the windows wireless system screwing up. Make sure your machine is service packed. Always helps. Try a different router if you can (One that you can control... So not your neighbour's ) Try a windows system restore (the one that puts it back to a certain date). It may sound like a noob-ish solution, but it's got me out of a lot of problems. Try the laptop with a knoppix bootdisk or something simaler to REALLY check it's not a windows problem. Check your BIOS settings to make sure nothing has become disabled that shouldn't be (I'm not familiar with the BIOS setup of your laptop, so I'm not sure if there is an 'enable wireless' option somewhere) If none of the above help... You might have to send your laptop back to dell. You could open it up and play about with it if you REALLY want, but it's not something I'd suggest on a 3 month old laptop. Good luck :) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tabath Posted May 16, 2006 Author Share Posted May 16, 2006 Thanks for your reply. I sort of went through everything you suggested apart from the knoppix - I had pclinuxos boot disk but it didn't have right drivers for my card. Anyway tried the knoppix and it went ok - connected wirlessly fine so it must be down to the win / dell setup softwareutils. Spent the last 15 mins checking them and boy are they a mess, if you don't do things n an exact certain order which non of the docs make clear they each keep changing the others settings. Finally managed it by running windows task manager to check when windows was loading anything while I was using the dell util to set up the card and connection. Sure enough I had to clos a couple of things before applying the changes I had made and hey presto I'm back on wireless. I really have no idea how this happened in the first place but I'm blaming MS and Dell! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
barrytone Posted May 16, 2006 Share Posted May 16, 2006 Glad to hear you got things sorted :) Knoppix can be a saviour Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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