New wireless card is both detected and not detected

Hi all,
Installed a new Intel 622AN wireless card in my laptop ( Sony Vaio VPCEB1Z1E) this morning to replace the Atheros 9285 that came with it. The Atheros card had been giving me random dropouts in signal and a latency problem with audio recording programs I use, but, it had always worked to some degree...

Until, I decided yesterday, to see if I could fix the dropout problem by installing an older driver. Of course, Windows 7's "helpful" driver updated doesn't seem to let you "update" to an older driver version, so I right clicked the card in device manager and hit uninstall, thinking I could then "update" from no driver, to the older version I wanted to test. This seemed to work, but then the card couldn't see or connect to any network. Device manager listed the card, but the network manager program seemed to think it no longer existed.

Cut to today, where I've installed the new card, and, lo and behold, I've got the same problem. I installed the Intel driver 13.0.0.107 (it came with the card), and I got the little message in the right-hand corner to say that the driver was installed correctly, but as far as the network manager and Intel's own MyWifi Utility program are concerned, the card doesn't exist.

So, I'm assuming I screwed something up yesterday . Any ideas on how I can fix it?

 

Hope you guys don't mind me bumping this thread. I'm genuinely at a loss as to how to fix this...

 

Any chance the wifi is disabled through a keypress or something? Maybe in the BIOS? Does the card show up fine in the device manager, can you look into the driver settings there?

 

Thanks for the reply. The card seems to be showing up fine in device manager, from there I can get to the driver settings and change them. My laptop has a physical switch on the case for WiFi on/off, but it's been on the whole time. How would I go about checking if the card is being detected in the BIOS?

 

The problem persists. I've tried updating the driver and re-installing some Vaio programs (Vaio Smart network manager sounded promising), but no luck. Anyone?

 

The only thing I could think of is that Sony may be blocking non-blessed wifi cards somehow, but I don't know why they'd do that. Sorry

 

Thanks again for the reply. It's possible it has something to do with the new card, but I'm starting to think it's the same problem I got when I uninstalled the driver for the original card (in order to roll it back to an older version). I get the feeling I may have uninstalled something else as well as the driver, because when I then installed an older driver for the old card, it threw up the exact same problem (visible in Device Manager, but not in network and sharing centre).
Here's a picture of my device manager, with the Intel card visible.

When I was uninstalling the old card, I right clicked on it in device manager, and hit uninstall (I then realised that had I gone into properties, there was an option "Uninstall Driver" ... is this different from the "Uninstall" option given by right-clicking?). The card itself was removed from the list, and to see it again I had to use "scan for hardware changes". When I reinstalled the old driver, the network and sharing centre couldn't see it. When I installed the new card and driver, I got the same problem. Could I possibly have uninstalled some other critical thing that could cause this?

 

It seems like there's almost a hardware error, not a software error.

The one thing you could try is downloading say a Linux bootable CD and seeing if it can use your card. Intel wifi cards should be well supported on an Ubuntu liveCD. That way we can tell if it's actually a hardware/BIOS issue, or if it's just Windows.

 

So... I've got good news and bad news. The good news is, I'm posting this from my laptop . I had another hard drive lying around, and I installed it, re-installed win7 on it, installed the intel card's driver and hey presto, the card was detected instantly. So it's looking like it's not a hardware error, thank god.
The bad news is, this hard drive isn't working properly (a different unrelated problem), plus all my stuff is on the other hard drive, so I'm going to have to put it back in eventually. It definitely seems now like I just uninstalled something important when I uninstalled the old card's driver, or maybe I turned off the wireless somehow in the BIOS or something (how would I check this on a Vaio? From what I've heard, Sony removes a lot of visible BIOS stuff from Vaios...)
So, all I need to do is figure out what I screwed up, and un-screw it up. Easy right?

 

Bit the bullet and reinstalled windows. After reinstall I installed the driver and Intel ProSet Wireless, and the card was detected. It's working, for now... I still have no idea why uninstalling the old card messed up the new card's installation, I'd wager it's just a Vaio thing, but if I get any more problems I'll post them here.