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Evening gentlemen.

I'm trying to fix a problem with my girlfriend's machine, and am swiftly recognising that I'm out of my league. Advice would be appreciated.

The crux of the problem is that it won't detect networks, via wireless or cable. Her 'TP-Link' program simply cannot detect a wireless network adapter at all. The troubleshooter, when attempting to detect/fix the problem, simply says that there 'might be a problem with the driver for the local area connection adapter'. I'm thinking drivers?

Try updating your drivers first, yeah.

Difficult to do when the blasted machine won't connect to the internet. I've managed to pin down the network adapter as being an Atheros model, so now I'm trying to track down the driver.

Gah. There are times when I really hate computers.

I can find you the driver if you get the model of card - Atheros makes the chipset, but maybe not the card itself. The best way to do that is, sadly, getting the hardware ID.

1.) Open Control Panel

2.) System

3.) Device Manager

4.) Find the device in question, which presumably has a yellow exclamation point as it has a problem - or shows up as "unidentified device", something like that. If not, keep going anyway. Right click and hit properties.

5.) Go to the Details tab. In the dropdown, find the Hardware ID, which will look like: PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_0082&SUBSYS_13018086&REV_34


6.) Either paste it here, or google that bad boy up.

----


Also, why are you using a TP-Link application to connect to wireless at all - have you tried windows networking instead?

A.) Hit the Windows key + R to bring up the run menu, type , Services.msc.

B.) A list of services will show up. Scroll to the bottom. Do you see WLAN Autoconfig (or Wireless Zero Configuration, if not Windows 7)? Is this service started? Is it disabled? Right click on it, and hit properties, and change the startup type to "automatic". Then hit the start button in that dialogue page and hit OK to close. Do you see networks in the tray now, at the bottom right near the clock?

Damn Ouze... my desktop support "hat" just popped on.

Ketara... pay attention to this man.

I had an issue with an Atheros network card recently. For some reason it was starting up in "off" mode - you had to use the keyboard shortcuts to enable the wireless (fn + F2 on the laptop in question).

No matter what drivers I updated to it refused to fix the problem so you have to continue to manually turn on the wireless each time you start the laptop.

Not sure if this is the same problem you are having?

Edit: Ohhh... going to try Services.msc - sounds like that might be my issue!

Edit 2: Yep! Thanks Ouze!

Hello, I am aforementioned girlfriend Cami.

Just borrowing Ketara's account to reply. I turned on the WLAN Autoconfig in Services.msc and I'm looking in the Device Manager, thus far there are two exclamation marks, one on 'Network Controller' the other on 'unknown device'.
The Network Controllers has multiple hardware id's listed so I'll just bung them in...
PCI\VEN_168C&DEV_0032&SUBSYS_3118168C&REV_01
PCI\VEN_168C&DEV_0032&SUBSYS_3118168C
PCI\VEN_168C&DEV_0032&CC_028000
PCI\VEN_168C&DEV_0032&CC_0280

Unfortunately I'm not sure which of these I need...
I'll have a quick poke around on Google on my lamentably slow acer notebook and see what I can see.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Hello Cami again,

I managed to find the drives on the internet on my notebook and install them by sticking them onto my external harddrive, and those horrible exclamation marks disappeared and now, after a tantrum from my wireless I'm online again!
Ouze you are some sort of genius and deserve a medal, I can finally get on with my Christmas work.
Thankyou for your help, I'm so relieved to have it sorted!

Good deal


So far as the WLAN Autoconfig / Wireless Zero Config being disabled - some PC vendors use their own little applets to control wireless connectivity. In my support experience which is fairly in-depth these applets are virtually never an improvement upon Windows's built in wireless stack and are best disabled and Windows wireless re-enabled.

This does not extend to the drivers, for which the vendor drivers usually offer better performance than the generic Windows drivers, but that's a whole other thread and not the problem here.

Many thanks for helping out my girlfriend gentlemen. Alas, I had to abandon the effort to go to work before reading the above. So I told her to steal my account and talk to Ouze.