BigLar

I have a friend who wants a cheap laptop he can take with him and bang about. All he really needs is some storage space and wifi. He had an old Dell D600 as a candidate. I said it would probably work, so he gave it to me to bring up.

Loaded an OS (XP, because I had it laying around) and loaded all the relevant drivers from the Dell website. Well, it all seems to work just fine, except wifi doesn't show up. They used different wifi cards (Dell, Intel) but none of the drivers seem to be able to do anything with it. The bios says it's there but I can't get to it.

So ...

I figure either the card is bad (they're certainly cheap enough, but we'd have to wait for the mail) or there's something wrong with the socket. It's got the latest bios and chipset drivers, and the card drivers seem to load normally (i.e., no error messages like "can't find card" or anything like that) but still it's like it's not even there. Re-connected all the wires, re-seated the card, etc. - all the usual tricks. Even the Fn-F2 software switch had no effect.

Under Win 8 (and maybe 7) there are some diagnostics you can run which will try to talk to the card. I don't know if there's anything in XP.

Does anyone know of any quick and dirty way to test a wifi card or should we just spend the five bucks and try another one? (Before you ask; no, I don't have another one around to swap out cards)

boberonicus

I could be wrong about this, but I think that laptop was "WiFi ready" which is like cars that are "ready" for satellite radio. In other words, there's probably no WiFi card in there at all.

BigLar

Oh, the card is there all right.

In the later Dells I've worked on, the wifi/bluetooth stuff is buried in the machine, so you have to disassemble it to get at it. The D600 (and maybe the D610) makes access easy - remove a cover and there they are.

Maybe they weren't sure at the time whether wifi would last.

ObscuredByClouds

I'd just spend the $5 and try a new one. In fact I'm so lazy I'd just install a PCMIA one so I didn't have to open the computer and waste the time lol

BigLar

Which is probably what we're going to do. I was just hoping there might be some little utility out there that would at last talk to it and see if it responded.
Oh yeah, it works fine with one of those slip-in wireless cards. But, as I said, he'll probably bang this one around a lot, so having it built in is one less thing to lose/break.

Interestingly enough, on working on some of the newer Dell laptops, I found that a) the wireless/bluetooth stuff is inside the case, so you have to at least partially disassemble the machine to get at it, and b) only the second memory slot is available (without disassembling it). On this one (D600), I just pop the covers and everything is right there in front of you.

ScottC

Have you tried turning it on with the keyboard combination (Fn + F2)? Try downloading a PCI card sniffer app to detect the vendor, then google the vendor to determine whether you have the right driver.

ObscuredByClouds

I found this out when upgrading my mothers Dell laptop can't remember what model - had to take the keyboard out and everything just to add the second stick of ram in. Rubbish design if you ask me

Good luck, I don't really know of any other way to test the wifi card - unless it's a driver problem as ScottC mentioned

javabytes

If you can't determine he model of the card by looking at it, look up the service tag number in the warranty lookup section of Dell's site. In addition to the warranty info, it also gives you the configuration, so you should be able to determine the installed wireless card. Then try the corresponding driver, getting it directly from the manufacturer if you have to (i.e. Intel).

BigLar

I was hoping someone could point me to something like that.

pseudoswede

Not too portable, but have you recommended just getting a USB wifi adapter?

gfunkdave

They can be totally portable - like this $9 one.

http://amzn.com/B008IFXQFU

unmesh

One relatively quick way to confirm that the BIOS is exposing the WiFi card correctly is to try a different OS, ideally one that does not need to be installed. My go to OS for this kind of thing is an Ubuntu Live USB build. If you can use the wireless card, you're now confident that it is an XP issue and not a hardware one.

LIH Prem

It's not showing up in device manager?

or in a tool like this? http://www.pcitree.de/

if it's physically enabled in the bios and the sofware switch is on (you checked that already), then it's probably just a bad card, try another.

-David

unmesh

FWIW, PciTree only runs on 32-bit versions of Windows.