Help! No Wireless Internet Access

[richard schlesinger]

Maybe someone here has encountered this or a similar problem:

I have a Belkin Wireless Network Card which
was working fine in my Toshiba notebook running Windows XP - until one day I bought a new battery, which switched my power management and seems to have stopped recognizing the PCMCIA slot (Texas Instruments pci-1420 CardBus Controller).

Could it be the TI driver? The BIOS? If I reinstall / upgrade, what risks do I run to the rest of the system?

Any help would be much appreciated.
Thanks
Richard

[Ernest Ford]

A Belkin card in a Toshiba laptop and you're posting in a HP/Compaq forum - don't Belkin & Toshiba have their own tech support?

Assuming that by "stopped recognising the PCMCIA slot" you mean that you cannot see the cardbus controller in the device manager, you could try running the Add Hardware wizard, and if that doesn't find it, a re-install would be a good step. If those don't fix it, then I'd say you have a defective motherboard.

You could also try using a USB wireless adapter.

[Ernest Ford]

One more thing - you could also try returning the CMOS setup to it's factory default - I'm not familiar with the Toshiba, but most laptops have some way to do that in the CMOS setup

[richard schlesinger]

There are Compaq users who had a similar problem with their PCMCIA slot no longer functioning. So I thought maybe someone would recognize the problem I was having and propose a solution I could try short of changing the motherboard, which I would regard as something of a nuclear option.

[Antoniov.]

Hi Richard,
what exactly does mean "switched my power"?
I guess before change battery you worked with electrical cable and now you work with battery.
What did you changed after installed new battery?

Antonio Vigliotti

[Nevert Bagir]

Hi,

I have an compaq Evo n1020v and I have a similar problem with "Belkin high-speed mode wireless g router". It went fine to install it the first time I bought the router in december 2004. Now, after harddrive format, the router cannot find the internet. Using cable works fine, but no router and now wireless.

[richard schlesinger]

What I mean by "not recognized" is that the PC Card is not enumerated at startup.

This problem has been identified by Microsoft running earlier versions of Windows, but I have not found a patch or workaround for the problem in XP.

I am reluctant to try the workaround that Microsoft suggests for Windows ME because I do not know what it might do to the system running XP.

Apparently, what has happened with some Compaq users is that a change in the Power Management has caused the PC Card to no longer get enumerated. But so far, I have not found any Toshiba users that have expressed the same problem. So does that mean that my problem is NOT the PC Card? Hard to know.

Thanks for your continuing thoughts on the matter.

Richard

[Ernest Ford]

Maybe we can clear up something here - is the problem that the PCMCIA/CardBus slot/controller is not recognised, or is it the PC card in the slot that is not recognised?

Can you see the controller in the device manager? If not you would appear to have a device driver problem or a defective system board.

If you know the controller chipset you can try to manually load the device driver and see what happens - be aware that WinXP does not have drivers for all of the recent controller chipsets - you may need to download the drivers from you laptop manufacturer's website.

I recently had a problem similar to this with a Dell Inspiron - the CardBus controller drivers, which are not included with WinXP, would not load, and I had to replace the system board.

[Nevert Bagir]

Dear Richard,

I have now several days later succeeded in installing both the Belkin router and the Belkin wireless nic. What it came to is to go to hp support driver link and install everything under OS enhancements.

this link refers to a discussion with people having the similar problems as you and me:

http://forums.windrivers.com/showthread.php?t=56959&page=2&pp=15 and here is the link for the enhancements if you have a evo n1020v xp pro as I do:

http://h18007.www1.hp.com/support/files/EvoNotebook/us/locate/64_5178.html#0

Hope this helps.