Lost my home wireless connection

[Keyboy]

Hello,

I am running a Dell Studio 1555 laptop with Win 7. It has run flawlessly until today. I use Comcast as my internet provider. A cable modem and a Netgear WND53700 wireless router. I have a desktop that is wired to the router. All I can say is that last night the laptop took a long time to shutdown. Today when I turned it on, The wireless monitor int he task bar had a red X in it and the message was Not Connected No Connections available. I figured out that I would try a restart and pay attention to the process as it completed. Interesting enough, I clicked Firefox to open it and for about two minutes things went well and then the red X appeared.

So far I have run a mal ware scan and found nothing. Device manager shows A Broadcom NetLink (TM) Gigabit Ethernet and a Intel(R)WiFi Link 5100 AGN and both do not have any error symbols. I am successful connecting the Laptop to teh router via a wire so I can still work on the laptop, but not in my favorite spot. Another thing I noticed is that the Function keys have switched behavior, in the past when I pushed F2 I opened the file name operation and now an antenna pops up. I searched and found directions to go to Mobility Center but the feature to switch the Key operation was not there, however, I did notice that the Wireless Network window had a button saying Turn Wireless off (so part of the system thinks it is on).

I did some searching and found several resets done through a CMD window but they didn't help. Several suggested deleting drivers after I had downloaded them from the net, but before I try some of these I cam here for advice.

What should I be trying?

Thanks in advance for your help!

 

[rclarke250]

Assuming other devices that use wireless are working on your router, I would try and do a restore in windows to Friday when it worked, if that fails, I would delete drivers and install them again. I know on my devices, every wifi router in the neighborhood pops on the screen, if you see nothing, it may just be a failed card, they do burn out. They are cheap can get a replacement for under 15$ USD.

 

[Keyboy]

Hi rclark250,

Thanks for your reply and insight. I selected a restore and after a while a message popped up saying that the restore could not be completed because a firewall was active and interfering. I disabled the firewall and tried again. The message this time was that it couldn't complete but didn't say why. It was late at night and I shutdown. Today I copied all files to a portable HD so I wouldn't lose them. I was having a problem with Robocopy so I hooked up to my router with a wire. I fixed Robocopy (use it in a bat file), and then unplugged the wire. Low and behold the wireless connection kicked in and seems to be working fine.

I will have to watch it.

Thanks again!

 

[xwb]

The function key thing is a BIOS setting. Restart - go into BIOS (on mine it is F2). Advanced menu - somewhere down there is a setting for the function keys.

 

[Keyboy]

Hi,

The net card bit the dust and needed to be replaced. Working fine now. Fixed the Function key in the bios as well. Thanks!