Hi all,

one for the lovely i.t crowd probably here, but here goes…

Got a new laptop for myself and rather than discard the old one i decided that my eldest daughter could have it as they are starting to use them more at school now, so everything was working fine, but i decided to give it a fresh install of vista and start from scratch. All installed fine but when installing the drivers it now refuses to accept there is a wireless card built in, no problem i think maybe just needs an update, so plugs it into the router to do all the updates, still no joy…arse. Have just finished trying an old copy of xp and this is the same, now for the weird part, i have a usb stick with ubuntu on it and this boots up fine and finds the wireless straight of, stick the key in and off i go.

Any ideas then why windows refusing to accept its there.

Prepared to just install ubuntu, but that will mean a new learning session for me and the daughter.

Cheers

Wrong drivers?

all using the supplied disks, used before with no problems, tried going on manufacturers website and getting upto date versions, still nothing, yet the linux distro works fine.

Built-in or separate card?

What's the laptop?

When you gave it a 'fresh install of Vista', was that what was on it before?

When you tried 'an old copy of XP', you did a fresh install you mean?

built in card on an medion sim2090 notebook with vista as standard

yep fresh installs of both vista and xp using supplied drivers (both vista and xp on disc)

nothing shows in device manager under network devices, yet as i said ubuntu see's it straight off and works fine with it.

And the device manager doesn't find any new devices when you perform a search?
Is there a button on the laptop to turn off the wireless? Perhaps you need to switch it on first for Windows to see it in the first place?

yep button to turn it on off, makes no difference, and rescaning does nothing, when trying to install driver it tells me that the hardware is not present, god knows, new one to me and a google search turns up nothing useful, looking like ubuntu is staying on