Dell Drivers
 

I rebuilt my laptop today, and everything but the wireless card is functioning.

I can't find the wireless card drivers on the Dell website (I've tried 4 that are supposed to work). My computer did not come with the disk of preinstalled stuff and the auto scan doesn't work either.

I have Dell 700m running XP. I can't tell what brand of wireless card it is. If anyone can find the chipset and driver for it, I'd be forever grateful.

Watch the BIOS while you boot up (you may have to hit esc or spacebar or a function key to get rid of a splash screen). It might give you some detail about what card you have. Then you can go straight to the manufacturer's site. Don't what else to tell you if you've tried all of the options on the Dell site.

On a side note, one of the major projects I work on is with Dell. I get emails with titles like "Dell Drivers" all the time. Kinda freaked me out to see that on the board.

Try:

Start->Control Panel->System->Hardware->Device Manager

Dig around in there and see if you can find it listed, it might be labeled as unknown device but the properties might show you the make/model.

After installing the first driver, did you uninstall each driver and reboot before trying the next one? Trying to run conflicting drivers can lead to fugly results.

If none of that helped, I suggest you perform a hard reset - drop it out a second floor window. (Note: This assumes you still have a full warranty including breakage) and start from scratch.

Also you might want to call dell. Compared to a lot of other companies they are typically pretty good about answering their tech support lines.

It says no driver details available because no driver is installed. Machine is 4 years old, no warranty and Dell wants lots of money to help. I just rebuilt the machine. Prior to that there were no issues. (Rebuilt for performance issues). I have uninstalled each driver that I downloaded before installing the new one. The Dell help I found says that I need to install a chipset first. Which would be cool if I could find it.

This should be your chipset driver:

http://support.dell.com/support/down...&fileid=149851

Install that, then go back and try the various wireless drivers.

Thanks. G. I haven't restarted yet since I saw your post. I have been downloading other software.

My advice? Buy a Mac.

Chipset is good. The support.dell.com site is a lot better then how I was going about it. I love the randomness of it. Can't find the information about the model. It's like it doesn't see it.

Yeah, it's an unfortunate hole in the plug'n'play system. If there is no driver in the system at all, you can't get any info.

But there are a bunch of options available on the dell support site there, one of them should work.

All better!

Thanks guys!