Reinstalled windows XP-now cannot connect wirelessly to internet

proteuspal

Hi all
firstly I would like to wish everyone a happy christmas and hopefully an enjoyable new year. In order to pass a bit of time today I decided to do a system reinstall on my dell vostro 1520 as I had gotten a few viruses such as trojans etc. I used the CD which came with the laptop when originally purchased.
I saved all my documents etc and put in the reinstall CD. It took maybe 55 minutes to complete the setup. I restarted the machine and as expected my desktop was bare apart from the recycle bin. So next I attempted to connect to the net but could not even find the icon for the wireless in the bottom right of the screen. So I found I had another CD for installing drivers. I inserted that CD and it was able to tell me what driver I did have on the laptop and I noticed I had no driver for a wifi connection. It gave me two that I could install: 1. Intel(R) wifi link 5100 or 5300. I went for the 5300 and installed it. Just after installation completed I got a message in the bottom right of my screen saying :'Adapter Problem-driver is not installed'.
Hence I have not been able to pick up any wireless signals. Im quite annoyed about this happening. I have successfully got my sound going, and I have tested my built in webcam which works fine. My next task is to get the wireless going so I can test if all the viruses are really gone.
Can anyone offer any advice on what I can do to get the driver going?
Kind regards
Proteuspal

MarkR

I would imagine it must be the other driver. Do you know the model of your wireless card? Can you connect the laptop (assuming it's not this one) to the net via a ethernet cable?

proteuspal

thanks Mark. When I right click my computer and go into properties and device manager, the network adapter I have is called a 1394 net adapter. I am currently using a pc here as we speak to write these messages.
I have just connected a cable from my modem directly to the laptop and I seem to get no ethernet connection either...any ideas?
Many thanks

proteuspal

By the way, I took an ethernet cable and connected my laptop direct to modem, this failed and so I connected it directed to a spare port on my router and still no luck. Damn its annoying.

omen80

The 1394 is the firewire port so its not that. I used to work in IT Tech Support until last summer. You should try the following steps, sometimes this works:
1. Insert the driver CD
2. Go into Device Manager
3. Right-click on each network port that has a "?" sign in yellow and select to install the driver from a specified location
4. Browse to the CD and see if it picks up the correct driver that way. You can probably try this for all of the other drivers that are not installed too.

If this works then make sure the wirless adapter is physcially switched on - there should be a button somewhere on your laptop depending on the model. It should then pick up any available networks in range.

Odaise Gaelach

proteuspal wrote: »

thanks Mark. When I right click my computer and go into properties and device manager, the network adapter I have is called a 1394 net adapter. I am currently using a pc here as we speak to write these messages.
I have just connected a cable from my modem directly to the laptop and I seem to get no ethernet connection either...any ideas?
Many thanks

You're not getting any ethernet connection most likely because the drivers for your ethernet card are not installed. 1394 is a firewire connection.

You can download the drivers for your Vostro from the Dell website. Follow the instructions and you'll be able to download all the drivers you need for your laptop. Burn them to a CD or copy them onto a USB key and then onto your laptop and install them form there.

By the way, next time you're planning on re-installing Windows make sure you've got all the drivers and software you need ready to hand so you can get back up and running again with little hassle.

Stheno

Dell drivers are fussy and need to be installed in a particular order (the bf's inspiron has this problem too)

If you check the Dell site it should give you all the drivers and the order in which to reinstall them.

stick-dan

Go to dell enter in your service code and download the drivers, that'll do it.

proteuspal

Hi stick-dan. what is the service code and where can I get it?

Stheno

Its often also called a service tag.

Turn your laptop upside down and it should be close the to Windows COA sticker. It will say service code/tag and then a number.

proteuspal

Ok, so I have used the tag to find out the drivers i need. However, it seems impossible to get them from the PC to the laptop where they are needed. A simple 'save target as' type arrangement does not exist. Any help with getting them from the pc to the laptop would be greatly appreciated. kind regards

ricman

Save em to pc ,in folder x, then copy all the files to a usb drive,a laptop can have 3 or 4 networking driver files,eg,wifi ,lan network driver,networking chipset driver etc,then copy files to folder a on the laptop.or BURN the files to a cdr disk.

Stheno

ricman wrote: »

Save em to pc ,in folder x, then copy all the files to a usb drive,a laptop can have 3 or 4 networking driver files,eg,wifi ,lan network driver,networking chipset driver etc,then copy files to folder a on the laptop.or BURN the files to a cdr disk.

+1 do this, use a usb stick if you can

Great to have on standby should you ever need them again, and as someone said earlier, a real lesson in having everything before you start!

I've the drivers for both the Bf and his daughters Dells saved to usb so I no longer need to bother looking them up.

MarkR

There is a weird download manager that dell tries to get you to use, which I find awkward. Click on download, and choose the option to download your internet browser.

It should either ask you where you want to download it, or download it to the browsers default location.

I would only bother with wireless or wired network card. Once you have that, then you can do this on your own laptop.

Stick the file on a usb flash drive, and run it on the laptop.