Problems with wireless being disabled

OK I have a compaq presario V2000 notebook and recently had to reinstall windows XP home due to a very bad virus that I was unable to work around. Being that I am far from a professional I managed to reinstall an operating system. however this system was not the one that came with the V2000 notebook. This is the OS that came with the R3000 notebook ( I cant find my original OS disc!) that I had purchased a year earlier but is now useless due to a busted screen.
On to my point: when I go to press the wireless button; nothing happened. I contacted HP support online and told them about the above menchoned chain of events and my reply included a wireless driver. As instructed I downloaded the driver onto my D drive and installed it, restarted the computer and upon pressing the button again it simply says "disabled". I open the device manager to enable it and I cannot find the driver that I installed!, HP then gave me an entire list of things I could do to resolve the problem but none of them have worked because the driver that i installed (i tried many times) is not listed in the device manager! this is terribly frustrating and I was wondering if it would be easier to call HP and ask them to send me the OS that originally came with this notebook; my friend said i should only have to pay shipping and handeling.

Any suggestions?
~Computer illeterate

 

If you get an exclamation mark or question mark in device manager, then you dont have the right driver, make sure windows xp is updated to SP2, if you dont get any funny signs in device manager, then it may be installed but not being recognized by the system, in this case you have to try several different drivers for your wireless computer, if thats a built in card, uninstall it from the device manager, and restart, windows will tell you it found a new hardware, then you tell it where to look for the driver!

in network connections, you right click on Wireless Network connection and then enable it, like you said, press the wireless button, and make sure you find a wireless key on your keyboard, (some computers like mine, need the button on one side of the computer and F8 to make wireless work), then check the ip, if the wireless is 169.x.x.x.x you may have to check the router, and see if you have a wepkey, if thats the case, disabled it, and then reboot and check ip again....

If the original OS disk can be sent to you, I dont know why you're bothering with all this stuff... goodluck and have a nice day!