Wireless help needed

[PTROTH]

OK, I went and did something stupid (surprise surprise). At some point I disabled the wireless card on my old laptop thinking I'd never connect that way anyhow. Now I'm stuck offsite and can't figure out what I did or how to undo it. Any suggestions?

[Yellowhello]

What OS are you running?

[PTROTH]

XP SP2

[Yellowhello]

OK. Get to "My Network Places" usually by right clicking on the little networking icon in the system tray (lower right hand corner on screen) and clicking on "Open network connections". Then right click on the wireless icon and click "enable". that should do it.

[Stormcrow]

If that doesn't work, you may need to go into the device manager and re-enable the card there.

[PTROTH]

Nothing there under that name. I've got three options 1) 1394 Connection - Connected - 1394 Net Adapter 2) Local Area Connection - Network cable unplugged - Realtek RTL8169/8110 Family Gigabit Ethernet NIC 3) Local Area Connection 3 - Cisco Systems VPN Adapter. Is there a very basic way I could have stopped my pc from recognizing an internal card? This setup is nearly 4 years old and I know when I bought it new from the vendor it had an internal wireless card.

[PTROTH]

I seem to remember setting something years ago to not power the antenna. Is that possible?

[Stormcrow]

Try this:
Start-control panel-performance and maintenance-system, then at the hardware tab click device manager. When that comes up, look under network adapters to see if anything is disabled. If so, re-enable it.

[PTROTH]

Nope - everything is enabled. Show hidden devices reveals more entries under Network Adapters, but they're all enabled. Could it be something in the bios? I was reading in some other threads that a sister model has an FN+F11 command that turns the wireless device on and off at the bios level. I've asked for help on that particular board, but haven't seen any responses yet. any thoughts?

[Yellowhello]

Originally Posted by PTROTH

Nope - everything is enabled. Show hidden devices reveals more entries under Network Adapters, but they're all enabled. Could it be something in the bios? I was reading in some other threads that a sister model has an FN+F11 command that turns the wireless device on and off at the bios level. I've asked for help on that particular board, but haven't seen any responses yet. any thoughts?

I'd give it a try. If it doesn't work I can only come to the conclusion that it have had wireless capabilities in the first place...