Vostro 1500 wireless stopped working!

My wireless has stopped working on my laptop! I am using vista business and cannot find any networks, even though i know for a fact I use to find 4/5 from my house, including my own.

Vista tried to diagnose the problem, it said a service was not running... so it turned it on, then it told me the problem may still be there because my wireless isnt switched on? so i flicked the wirless switch off and on again but Its still not working!


Please help me someone!

 

It just keeps giving me this error "wireless capability on this computer is turned off"

 

Can you reinstall or repair the driver? You can get the wireless driver off the dell site.

Otherwise make use of that legendary dell warranty.

 

Ive just noticed the light for the wifi is not on, only the bluetooth one.

I need my laptop in 5 days time for the start of university! i REALLY dont want to have to reformat a new laptop again and wait for a new one to be delivered.

 

you could also try a system restore? but i think the driver repair would work if your hardware isn't broken

If i were you i would go get myself something like norton ghost and back up your working desktop with all your softwares installed. also keep all working documents on an external hdd (and DVD backups for critical documents) plus a separate partition on the main HDD.

 

It was working fine last night! then all of a sudden i had no connection, i was pretty tired though so i just went to sleep. This morning i turned it on and cant find ANY connections. Why would it just break like this?!

Im downloading the drivers to resintall them and see what happens. Is there any way of checking if it is actually on? Could it be a setting in the bios?

 

System restore did not fix my problem... any more suggestions? Dell technical support is closed also, just tried phoning them.

 

Pretty sure it is a hardware problem if the WiFi light is not lit. I would suggest a few things:

1. turn on the wireless switch and leave in on for a minute or two. Sometimes it takes several seconds for the machine to connect to the wireless network

2. check the BIOS (reboot machine and hold down F2 as it boots up). Make sure that WiFi is enabled

3. Flash the BIOS

If this fails, just wait until Monday when Dell support opens up again and call them. If you have 5 days until school starts, you can afford to wait - I am assuming that you can still connect to the Internet, since you are still posting messages. Dell support can talk you through the more obvious steps. If your Wifi card is kaput, they can send you a new one - its easy to remove and replace.

Don't be to worried about this. Laptops often have things go wrong with them up front - just check out some of the other threads on this forum if you don't believe me. Most of the time they can be fixed easily.

 

What the hell? all of a sudden the light just turned on and it now works perfectly?!!!

I really dont understand. I did nothing!

 

Computers are not perfect, just like the people who made them are not perfect .

but could be a loose card. Pop the back cover off and reseat the card. Push down on the antenna pins to make sure they are connected properly.

 

Actually, this happened to me on the first day I got my HP dv6500t. The problem ended up being when I uininstalled Norton. What ended up fixing it was doing a system restore... which put the notebook back to day one. That put Norton back on. Then I went to symantecs site and used their uninstall tool when takes out all symantec apps, including norton. CCleaner found even more stray files.. So if this happened after uninstalling norton, this could be the issue. If you can, try doing the system restore at a point when Norton was on there.. Or try reinstalling Norton.

If this is not the problem, then try to remember what the last thing you did before this happened. In my case, it was pretty obvious since I uninstalled Norton and it required a reboot. After the reboot, wireless gone!

 

Hmm, nothing was installed "recent" (within 6 hours) of this happening! and it happened suddenly!

oh well, works now