Vostro 1400 - Wifi disappeared

My friend bought a Dell Vostro 1400. Had it for about 10 days and the wireless disappeared. He says he walked away while using wirless internet and came back and it was not working. The wireless light will not turn on. I looked in the device manager under vista and did not see the wireless card listed. Just the bluetooth. The switch will turn on bluetooth. I installed wireless card drivers and got a wifi icon when flipping the switch, but still nothing in device manager and no light. I went in to bios and made it so that the switchc turned on just wifi and not bluetooth and that did not work either. I also tried disabling the wireless and re enabling it with no luck.

I looked through the recovery partition and found a \Tools\PCRestore.exe file and it asks me if i want to reformat and recover but before it starts i get a "access to \tools\dp.sc was denied" error. Im looking through that folder and do not see that file.

Any ideas as to what it could be?

 

Ok... I restarted w/ f8 and did the system recover. When I got it back up i had the wireless switch turned to off and had everything enabled in the bios. I opened up the device manager and saw that it had a dell 1395 adapter. as soon as i turned the switch to off, not only did the light not come on, the 1395 entry disappeared. I then d/l the 1395 drivers for vista and before the install it says it can't find the hardware. I guess just the wireless portion of the laptop died on me? I guess I'll be calling tech support tomorrow.

 

No, if you turn the WiFi switch off it turns off the hardware. I use the switch sometimes if i'm running on battery mode and have my laptop plugged into an ethernet port.

Most laptops have this feature btw. The switch needs to be set to the ON position in order for your WiFi to work.

 

Yeah, I know that it turns it off, but turning it to the on position does nothing. I meant to say in the last post that when i turned it to the on position, the device disapeared from device manager. The light will not turn on no matter what and neither windows nor the drivers found the device. I called up tech support and they had me run a diagnostic which found nothing. The crazy thing is, after i did the pcrestore to factory settings, after restarting the computer a couple of times, it would lock up at the windows bootup screen, the one with the progress bar. I proceeded to do the pcrestore again and it got in to the desktop but then locked up while it was still loading everything up. after that it wwould stall at the windows boot screen.

it's only like 10 days old, so he's going to be exchanging it for a new one. I have a Vostro 1400 as well and was the one that recommended it to him. I haven't had any issues so far.

 

Sorry I misunderstood your post. Glad your getting a new one.

 

hi there i have a similar problem that just happened to me, i was using my wifi, left with the laptop lid down came back, opened the laptop lid and windows wouldn't load i rebooted and my wifi disappeared

network connections doesn't list my wifi there only my wired, device manager can't see or find the hardware... wireless assistant won't load... the switch stays yellow(off) my wifi disappeared..

does anyone have any clues?
i don't want to try a recovery until i back my files up.

i guess i should make another topic, but since im new here i didnt want to clog the forums up with a similar topic recently posted

i should note my laptop is a HP dv2150 running on WinXP MediaCentre

 

i had a similar problem when i changed my OS. (I couldnt find any signal to any wireless network) Honestly, i think the driver given by the CD is wrong. Try downloading the driver online (at Dell.com) and installing it on the computer. It worked for me.