Wireless Troubleshooting

Help troubleshooting wireless adaptor problems?

It worked fine last night, but when I booted this morning, my wireless adaptor was disabled in the device manager. I tried troubleshooting it, and immediately after that the adaptor vanished from my device manager and network connections. I reinstalled the drivers with no success, and had no success with a destructive system recovery, either. Is there anything else I can try to do before resorting to taking it in to be looked at? Scrappy P, thank you for confirming what I was afraid of. It's possible that the laptop is still under warranty, but if not I'll have to take it in and have it replaced. I'm just not comfortable working on the hardware on these things.

Public Comments

1. If you've already re-installed the drivers, AND did a destructive recovery, you are probably looking at buying a new wireless adapter. There wouldn't be anything I can think of that an in-store tech would be able to do for you. Good luck! Cheers
2. Try deleting it before reinstalling it. Also, sometimes - just sometimes - you can enable it and it will start working. Sometimes manually adding a generic adapter will also give you a prompt to decide which you want to use, also forcing the system to recognize it. Another option is that there could be an upgrade on the company's site. It's possible that it was not compatible with some Windows Updates, or some other such issue. Try getting an updated driver from the company's site. It is also possible that there is another driver that's in there conflicting with it . . . so Windows just decided to disable one at random. Set up a restore point and delete all of them then reinstall. I could go on. I think there are other things you could at least try before scrapping it.