Urgent: T500 sudden loss of Wifi

Hi,

T500, Vista Business last updated from Lenovo today.

I was sitting and working on the internet while ITunes were updating itself. All of a sudden I hear this sounds that you also hear when a USB key gets plugged or unplugged. No internet no network after that sound. When I hit the blue Thinkvantage button theres no WIFI option to turn on...

Nothing in eventlogs. Access connections just report that the Intel 5300 Wifi adapter isnt present.

There has never been any problems with this laptop before. Please advice!

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Have you booted at all since this has happened? You may need to remove all voltages from it. Open it up and remove the battery. Pull any other power from it. After about 60 seconds of so power it back up.

Renee

 

Sometimes that works.

Check Device Manager and see if the wireless adaptor is there.

 

do Fn+F5 to make sure the wireless is turned on, for some reason my T500 with intel 5350 does this crap all the time. Shuts itself off for no reason.

 

Thanks for all your suggestions.

Unfortunately, the battery-out-thing didn't work either. About the "FN+F5" solution: This is where you usually turn on the Wifi but my Wifi is NOT presnt on that list anymore! Theres only "Bluetooth" and "Wireless WAN". I can turn on Bluetooth but NOT Wireless WAN. And as I said WiFi which used to be the third option in that list is not there anymore...

Nothing happens if I try the Wireless WAN btw: Are the Wifi and Wireless WAN running on the same antenna(s)? So maybe I have hit a hardware failure?

The Intel Wifi AGN 5300 is not listed in hardware - but it just sounds silly that it would break standing still on a table?

This is so bad - my vacation started yesterday and I was counting on bringing the laptop with me

 

If you need wifi on your computer while on vacation you could buy a USB wireless adaptor to tide you over, until you can get it repaired.

http://www.dlink.com/products/?pid=334

Or a pccard wifi adaptor
http://www.amazon.com/D-Link-DWL-G650-Wireless-Cardbus-Adapter/dp/B00007LTB6

I'm sure you know these things exist. Sometimes though, there are people that don't.

 

Yes, but I appreciate it anyways. I didnt really think of it to be honest - and I actually have a spare Linksys USB in a desk somewhere!

But it turned out it want nescessary this time!

I couldnt help thinking that this problem was caused by either my Itunes update or the Lenovo system update that went before that...So the best bet was the Lenovo update because one of the things that were updated was the GPS driver. And my Wireless WAN didnt work after this update either.

So I went into device manager, right clicked the GPS driver and removed it. Then right clicked the computer and searched for hardware changes. To my surprise, the Intel 5300 was displayed as an unknown network adapter. This meant that the hardware wasnt fubar! So I let Windows pick up the drivers from "system32" and now it all works again!!!

The GPS however isn't working but I dont use it for anything important so thats alright for now...well if it was the GPS driver or something in the Itunes update that triggered this fault it hard to say, but since the fault happened during Itunes update and noone else in the Lenovo community has reported problems with the GPS driver I tend to believe in some coincidence of combinations

Thanks for all your suggestions. Once again this community has gotten me in the right direction!

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