Compaq F700 and wifi

[The_Other_One]

Sooo... I go to my grandparents and they complain about not having any Internet. First thing I notice is a little "!" on their network icon. Simple fix, it's the router (there appeared to be something wrong with the router too, but I'll work on that later...) So anyway, after poking around for a bit, I realized I couldn't see ANY wireless network. The light by the wifi switch was also always illuminated regardless of the on/off position. And to top it off, no card in device manager.

I remove the wifi card, reseat it and try again...no dice. I pop in another wireless card I had for a Dell...no dice (no new hardware found either). I boot to a Ubuntu Live CD...no wireless. Now I'm very confused!

Is it possible the mini-PCIe slot died? The cards still heat up so something's happening there. I'm going to poke around a bit more in Ubuntu to hopefully confirm it's not software related, but I'm quite baffled at this one.

--edit--

An interesting thing just happened. Just to try stuff, I decided to flip the switch to the left and start it up (I assume that's disable wireless) Anyway, I got a POST error saying "unsupported wireless card". I was using the Dell card still, but realize I'd just booted the darn thing with the card in there with no errors. Shut it down, went back to the old card, no errors, but nothing in Ubuntu either. Back to Vista, and I don't see the card...

 

[AdmnPower]

Hmm, that's quite odd. You say nothing is listed under device manager with either card and either OS so i'm going to guess you're dealing with some sort of odd hardware failure. What you might try is a USB wireless adapter. If that doesn't work it would help eliminate the possibility of a bad Mini-pci slot.

 

[The_Other_One]

I read up into it some and sure enough, these laptops have a known issue with the PCIe slot, What makes things worse is they also don't have express-card slots. I had a spare desktop/USB wifi card, but it does rather defeat the purpose of this laptop...

Eh, well I'll probably return it to them tomorrow and just see what they wish to do. I hate it though. The darn thing's only about 1.5 years old!

 

[AdmnPower]

Yeah, that's the bad thing about laptops. To fix it they'd probably have to replace the whole motherboard. If it's that new perhaps it's still under warranty, although I doubt it.