Thinkpads Forum

I have my mother-in-law's old R50e (1834-U3G) on which I did a factory restore.

It has Intel 802.11bg Wireless but Windows XP SP3 will not find this adapter and neither will Lenovo system update. I have spent a day trying to get wireless to work by installing all sorts of drivers (Hotkeys, etc.) from the Lenovo site.

In the end I tried my PC Doctor bootable CD. It found the adapter and it passed all the tests. So please tell me why can't Win XP detect the adapter?

P.S. I have tried searches on here and Lenovo's forum and found nothing that has worked.

killer wrote:but Windows XP SP3 will not find this adapter.

There were numerous reports of WiFi driver issues when XP SP3 first came out.... you might want to check that all the Microsoft updates have been applied to the OS.

Cheers,

Bill B.

Thank you, Bill. After reading your advice it confirmed to me that that SP3 could be the offender, which I had suspected all day.

I'll try uninstalling it and see what happens and then report back.

Best regards.

I uninstalled SP3 to no effect.

The other suspect was ThinkVantage Client Security Software. I uninstalled that.

Then I tried Thinkvantage System Update and it said I could install Intel 802.11bg drivers.

That done it is now working.

So it appears that it was the very large bloatware of Client Security Software (suspect number 2) that was the cause.

More news, which I am posting in case anyone else has similar problems.

I thought I'd try installing Access Connections to manage wifi connections. That resulted in the adapter disappearing once again.

So I uninstalled Access Connections and went to the Intel website where I downloaded the drivers for the adapter together with Intel PROSet Wireless package. It worked a treat. I now have wireless working again and the PROSet software manages the wifi connections.

It must be time to trudge through the snow for a celebration pint at the pub.

killer wrote:It must be time to trudge through the snow for a celebration pint at the pub.

It's really amazing, last year this time we were buried under 2-3 feet of snow.
As of this morning, we've only had a small 'dusting' which lasted not even overnight, it's that warm here!
I only wished I'd live near enough a pub, that I could trudge there.
The nearest one is about 15 minutes by car...

don't say that too loud. i don't live that awful far from you. the snow gods might slam us. i do remember last year. i have a nice dent on the top of my van from that.