Need Help with Something That Should Be So Easy! A Connection Problem Is Driving Me Crazy!

originally posted by: okamitengu
a reply to: paxnatus

reinstall your Ethernet card drivers, or buy a new PCI ethernet card.

Well it'd be wifi as it's a laptop and I doubt that the OP wants to be tethered to a wall, and opening up a laptop and replacing the NIC would be really silly considering again it'd be the wifi drivers not working.

On the bottom of your laptop should be a model number, which hopefully corresponds with one of the model on the Lenovo website.

This is assumption of course, not knowing the specs of the laptop. But I'd suggest going to their website:

Lenovo Support website

from there, click on
Browse Product

and you can then scroll down to

Laptops

and then to

IdeaPad Z series Laptops

This is where you should see the model listed.

That should then show you a list of all the available drivers for the laptop, and you would need to download the Network: Wireless LAN driver.

Obviously you'll be using a different machine, so a usb stick or something to copy it The number of times I've neglected that one thing, and it halts a repair.. especially in the day and age of no floppy drivers or hardly any re-writable cd's..

Knowing my luck, someone already helped ya anyway and you've resolved it but can't hurt..

Good luck!

a reply to: MasterKaman

youre right.....i bought one for my partner and its wireless drops all the time and i just dont care enough to troubleshoot it so its plugged in.

i have a similar problem with a 10yo sony vaio.....clean xp install.....drivers from sony installed.....intel pro doesnt work at all.....so i use a fairly low profile linksys dongle and its great.



some of us dont have money to buy a new lappy......some of us have enough other projects to mess about with nonsense like a bad driver that can be sidestepped with an old dongle i already had or can buy used for a few coins.


The other thing i wanted to suggest is trying a live boot of a large linux distro like mint or elementary os and see if the included drivers will match up.....just as an experiment.


you can use the penguin live usb boot installer and download the linux image all for free put it on a 4gb usb stick and see what happens just for fun.

Have you tried going into device manager and clicked the "add new hardware" option?

First , the CMOS battery is a what we call a "quarter" battery as that is what it looks like
The UEFI is the plce to go now.. A quick F1 at post and you are in. Load default settings , check date and time, adapters and uefi drivers. If all looks good , save , then exit.

a reply to: paxnatus

The "password unlocker" may not have been entirely benign. You may have to clean out malware. But try & get the networking going first as that'll make it easier.

As you said it has "no LAN settings", I'll assume that the WiFi and wired LAN ports are now missing from device manager. I'm also assuming you have Windows of some version.

Firstly, just ensure it isn't a hardware switch issue (some laptops have a switch that disables or enables the WiFi). You might have to search around for it. Other laptops use a function key (hold down the "Fn" key and also, at the same time, press the key with the 'WiFi' symbol - whatever it is). Allow a few seconds to see if it enables or disables things. Also on some systems there is a pop-up on screen that may take some time to show up.

Failing that, try the following:

Go into device manager and see if anything has an exclamation mark, under the 'network adapters' section. If it does, right click the device and uninstall it. If you see a check-box, at this stage do not check it. When the device is removed, don't reboot, just right-click another device and "scan for hardware changes". If all is good, the device should re-appear, hopefully without the exclamation mark.

If this doesn't work, remove the device a second time, but this time select the check box to uninstall the driver software. Then do another scan for hardware changes.

If that still doesn't work, download the drivers on another computer, or via a network cable, from the Lenovo support site, copy them to a flash drive and reinstall them to your laptop.

Next, try this:

Get the Tweaking.com 'Windows Repair All In One' and follow each step exactly, to the letter. Don't skip any stages (including the malware scan) & do it from 'safe mode'. To do it right takes a while but should fix your laptop. If it doesn't, then it's time to wipe & reinstall. Back up all your stuff first (external USB drive helps there) and either install from the builtin factory recovery, or have install media and windows keys on hand.

Hope you get going without all the fuss, though.

Just to throw in my .02 cents here. If your network adapters are both not working and not showing up in your device manager it might be time to consider a format and reinstall of the windows on that machine. Also if the OS is windows 7 or higher you could even just upgrade to windows 10 just to see if the laptop can handle it.

Now if none of that fixes the wifi card not working then here is a suggestion that fixed an old xp Dell laptop.


This usb dongle.
Link

For some odd reason the built in wifi network card had gone out in xp a couple of years ago and I gave up on it and had bought one of these dongles for xp.

Recently for a lark I upgraded the xp to windows 8 because I simply had the upgrade available and it was time to replace the HDD anyway so I put on xp and upgraded to win 8. Had to get the new dongle because the old dongle didn't have win 8 drivers.

Now heres the surprising part. The drivers for the new dongle didn't just make the old dongle work. The original network card came back to life and started to work as well.

What it was about those drivers I don't know but it fixed a few network problems. So if the wifi card still wont work after a new windows install try that dongle and it's drivers. It's worth a shot. And you still have Internet access if the wifi card is really bad.