Wifi switch not illuminating when on. Wifi not detected.

I have a Toshiba Satellite p505-S8980 (laptop), I have had it for a little more than a year, and I have had no issues with it. Unfortunately, the first issue has appeared.

I left my home to spend the weekend with my family, and now the laptop won't even detect the Wifi lan adaptor. Also The Wifi switch no longer illuminates, to acknowledge that it is on.


Any suggestion? Your help is really appreciated.

 

Hi DrVillain and welcome to the forums

First thing I'd do is check your device manager to see if the wifi card was accidentally disabled or if the driver is working properly. If it's disabled, then right click and select enable. If it's a driver issue, you'll need to reinstall your driver from Toshiba's website or from your driver disk.

 

thanks for the fast response! The device manager doesn't even show the wifi adapter. I guess that's where I'm lost.

 

In that case, I would still install the wifi driver (do it in safe mode). If that doesn't fix it, try and see if your wifi card is properly connected to the motherboard (some disassembly may be required).

 

Guess I got the short end of the stick here.. No luck.

 

A lot of laptops have physical switches that turn off the wifi devices, and what you're seeing is pretty much exactly what happens when those switches are turned off. Check to make sure your physical switch is turned on (looks like it's at the front-left of your laptop from what I'm seeing online)

 

Even if it's disabled via hardware switch, it will still show in the Device Manager. It'll just show a down arrow because it's disabled.

Open a command prompt and type "ipconfig". That will list off all network adapters recognized. If it's not in that list, something is wrong hardware wise or BIOS level. Some of the Sony Vaio's have to have their WiFi cards reseated in the mPCIe port for the same reasons... the card simply disappears from the Device Manager.