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Dell Wireless 1450 Radio Disabled - won't enable!

Hi Everyone,

I just re-installed the drivers on a Dell Latitude D505 for both the Intel Pro/100 VE LAN connection and the Dell Wirless 1450 Dual Band WLAN Mini-PCI card. Although the drivers installed just fine, I am still having a problem with the latter.

The wireless card is still showing the radio to be disabled, and whenever I try to enable it via the utility, it says "The Dell Wireless WLAN Card is still disabled. Slide the Wirless ON/OFF switch to enable it or press Fn-F2 to enable it."

After looking over the machine I can't find a wireless ON/OFF switch, and pressing Fn-F2 does absolutely nothing. Pressing Fn and any other combination works though, so it's not the button. I've searched through the forums but the best response I've seen were some Toshibas that masked off pins 11 and 13, although I couldn't imagine this would be necessary since the hardware and software came with the machine and worked previously.

So far I've tried repairing the connection, using the Dell utility to manage the connection, using Windows to manage the connection, going through the hardware manager and properties, changing advanced settings, and restarting the machine. I'm running out of troubleshooting ideas, anybody have any idea on how to make this work? Thanks.

- JS

Reply to
whoabuddy
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Anybody? I have someone pretty high up in the company who needs this fixed and honestly I'm out of ideas... any help would be greatly appreciated.

Reply to
whoabuddy

Have you enabled the device in device manager?

I had this on a Dell, different card but the icon in Networking said it was disabled and it was also disabled in Device Manager.

David.

Reply to
David Taylor

Yes, it is enabled in Device Manager, and honestly, all signs point to it working. I just can't find the source of the conflict. Thanks though.

Reply to
whoabuddy

snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com hath wroth:

Why did you reinstall these in the first place? What problem were you originally trying to solve? Did these work before you reinstalled?

formatting link

Wild guess: Check the CMOS setup and see if there's a wireless enable/disable setting.

2nd wild guess: Are all the USB ports working and properly configured? Try a USB memory dongle or mouse to be sure. 3nd Wild Guess: The 1450 is a USB adapter. The wireless on/off switch will do nothing for the external USB wireless adapter. I don't recall that FN-F2 will do anything. The Dell D505 normally comes with an Intel ProSomething internal MiniPCI wireless card. Is this still present? If not, is the driver for whatever MiniPCI card you installed still installed? If so, uninstall it.
Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

The 1450 is both a USB adaptor and a MiniPCI adaptor for some D505 laptops. The laptop has not been modified in any way and did not have or recognize any Intel PROSet drivers from their website. After looking up the service tag, I found out it was installed with a Dell

1450 MiniPCI wireless card, a close relative to the one you are thinking of.

As for the driver, when the machine was on there were no wireless cards present in the system. If I remember right, eight months to a year ago we disabled and uninstalled the wireless card because it was picking up connections in the building and annoying the user. Rather than just disable it, it was uinstalled completely.

Wild guess number one still makes some sense though, so I will give that one a shot and see what I come up with. I'm not sure why it isn't working, as all the settings say "yes" it should, but I will keep trying.

Thank you everyone for the help so far.

Reply to
whoabuddy

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