Hi. So my dear friend Jason lent me a dell laptop which I have just installed Windows XP SP2 Professional on. This is significant because I have no laptop right now. The only thing is, I am a total dunce when it comes to networking and I can’t figure out how to get it to connect to my home wireless network. This is, as you can imagine, totally ruining everything in the world. Is anyone out there a super genius who can help me connect? The little icon that normally appears that lets you look for wireless networks isn’t apearing, which is totally cramping my style.
Hey - are you still having problems connecting wirelessly? Did you install XP over another version of Windows? Did it install drivers for the wireless card? Also, XP SP2 adds security/firewall settings that are on by default. Are you able to connect the laptop to the internet via an ethernet cable?
Starting with the “little icon that normally appears that lets you look for wireless networks isn’t apearing” - are you looking in the lower right-hand corner or in the Control Panel itself?
check to see if your operating system is seeing your wireless card. If not you will have to download the driver. To do this find out what wireless card you have and type it into google with “driver” and download the software. From this step onward i would need to restart my computer and check. I am on the linux partition.
i’m guessing you got this solved already, but if not, make sure the dell wireless is on, depending on what model its either the function/f2 combination, or there’ll be a little pushbutton dealy on the right side, or maybe the right front, which is easy to push on/off accidentally and makes very many people sad.