Wireless lan help

[Lorne Day]

I'm trying to set up my lan with encryption, all was going well until I tried to set up my wife's Dell which has XP home SP2 installed. The device manager won't see any hardware, none, nada, zip! I even tried renaming, and copying the file from the other XP machine. Same result. Since the system isn't recognizing any h/w the network wizards, etc won't let me change the properties on the current device/connection. In fact it says that I have no connections at all.

I'm currently trying system restore to get back to where it will at least connect unsecure. So far system restore is telling me that it "cannot restore to this restore point". WTF:angry:

Any help is appreciated.

BTW, no probs with the Mac

 

[Jacob Dryer]

This maybe dumb but most laptops have an on/off switch. If it is off it will not typically detect in device manager.



It could be an actual hardware switch or it could be control with a function key like hitting function then f2 key is normal for hp/emachine

 

[Lorne Day]

I've tried SAFE mode, still won't work. Rebooted from a cold/hard off, no workie. Looked in bios for a switch or other action that would hide the h/w config, nothing.

I'm hoping that I don't have to rebuild. My wife doesn't understand the sick pleasure that I get from rebuilding a Windows machine.

 

[Dale Carlson]

Lorne, I found a thread on a computer-related forum that may or may not apply - see link below. There seem to be a number of different solutions that seem to be in order from harmless to potentially dangerous to your OS (depending on your experience level). But since you're thinking about a clean install anyway, you might give them a shot.