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

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.

In article <(E-Mail Removed) om>,
(E-Mail Removed) says...
> 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.

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.

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.

(E-Mail Removed) hath wroth:

>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.

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

http://www.dell.com/downloads/us/pro...l1450_spec.pdf

>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.

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.

--
Jeff Liebermann (E-Mail Removed)
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558

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.