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)