Windows 7 - HP DV6 - No Wireless.

[Jayce]

Someone asked if I could look at their personal laptop quick this afternoon, so I did. It has no wireless. It shows up in device manager just fine, but it just can't see any SSIDs in the area. The radio is enabled, however the light is orange 100% of the time on the dedicated wifi on/off button. I checked BIOS and verified that everything is enabled (even reset to defaults). I also updated the driver for the wifi card, whichi is a RaLink 5390 of some sort.

There's an HP Connections Manager installed, which to my eyes normally begs "uninstall me or I'll give you continual headaches." I tried to disable it to let the Windows manager take over but Windows didn't seem take notice to that. I re-enabled HP-CM but no dice back. I found a guide online which suggests once you open HP-CM you should see the available SSIDs right away, which I see nothing of.

Besides re-seating the card which I didn't have any available time to do, let alone even a simple screwdriver on hand, I figured I'd ask here. Is there anything software wise that could be causing this issue that I can relay over to the owner of the system? For now I gave the owner an ethernet cable in case they want to call HP and get remote assistance (hardwire to router), but even still I'd like to take a more extensive crack at this if anybody has a troubleshooting idea I may have missed.

Thoughts?

 

[rebootrequired]

Hey there! Sorry to hear about this problem. I to have gone through a few laptops with this same problem. Have you tried going to device manager and uninstalling it's current wireless drivers, restarting and visiting the hp support site to re-install them? Although most of the time the solution I have had to go through is re-seating the wireless card and rebooting or even using the "Intel Driver Update Utility" on their site to install the required drivers. Let us know.

 

[SCxnoxiousTechie]

Uhm . how about Resetting the modem?

 

[rebootrequired]

Uhm . how about Resetting the modem?

The modem has nothing to do with the orange light problem on the wireless icon. Plus he stated no wireless networks showed up. Only time the modem reset could have been the solution in this case was if he had wireless in the area but his router is not showing up if it's not a "Don't broadcast SSID" problem.

 

[Jayce]

Uhm . how about Resetting the modem?

I didn't bother with that. The issue of course began at the user's home, but when the user brought their laptop to work and it couldn't even see our guest wireless network, let alone connect to it, I knew that the LAN gear wasn't playing a key role in this situation.

What I should have done was fired up a LiveUSB instance of Ubuntu and see what it does for comparison. If a totally different operating system works flawlessly with wireless then it would at least rule out hardware.