Broken wireless on X61t -- am I missing something?

[primedude]

I have an X61 tablet where the 802.11 and WWAN are both broken.

The 802.11 device shows up in the device manager, and on the Fn + F5 menu. However, I cannot cause the device to power on. I have been through multiple OS reinstallations, as well as multiple times of a driver reload process recommended elsewhere on this board and by Lenovo.

The WWAN device does not show up at all in the device manager. No unknown devices either. Needless to say, this card does not function.

Both modules are physically present, and the 802.11 card has been replaced at least once (with no change). Therefore I assume the problem is with the PCI bus.

I sent the laptop in to Solectron last week; they spent three days "repairing" it, and I eagerly picked it up today from DHL. They were kind enough to fix the screen bezel issue, which developed in between my service call and the box's arrival and which I mentioned in a note in the box with the computer, but the wireless issue is utterly unchanged. (With respect to this failure: do I have any change of arranging for on-site service to properly repair my computer in a timely manner? Original service call was placed on 10/19, and various problems occurred with the return process.)

Is is possible there's something simple I'm missing? Yes, the wireless switch is on. I've been through the BIOS and every power management setting I can think of, and nothing can make these cards work. Is there anything very subtle that I should be aware of?

[ryengineer]

snip.......The 802.11 device shows up in the device manager, and on the Fn + F5 menu. However, I cannot cause the device to power on. I have been through multiple OS reinstallations, as well as multiple times of a driver reload process recommended elsewhere on this board and by Lenovo..........snip

Few days ago a colleague of mine brought her X61 tablet to me with EXACT same symptoms, it was a brand new machine with all the necessary drivers installed, but for some reason the Wireless and it's light on the status inidcator wouldn't power on. All I did was I went to:

C:\SWTOOLS\Driver\WLANINT\Vista\Apps\v32\iProInst\Repair.

Restarted the machine and everything started to work.

Obviously the problem you're experiencing could be different.

[primedude]

Thanks for the tip. I got really excited when I saw it since it was something I hadn't yet tried, and I couldn't wait to get home to see if it worked. Of course, that's when I realized that I have the Thinkpad/Atheros (not Intel) wireless card.

I did, however, finally fix my problem, so I'm going to describe it here in the hopes that someone else comes across it one of these days, and it helps them out as well. I'm also going to toss in a lot of extraneous key words that might help this show up in a search. For example:

thinkpad wireless broken won't power on installed device manager doesn't sppear show up broken wwan 802.11 a/b/g/n verizon sierra wireless mc5725 atheros mini-pci PCI disabled

To sum up: My X61 Tablet would not recognize the physically present WWAN card, and while it recognized the 802.11abgn Thinkpad wireless adapter, that wireless card wouldn't turn out using Fn+F5, even though I had reinstalled Windows multiple times and tried the Lenovo-prescribed driver reinstallation method.

Note also that this happened on an X61 tablet, but it seems likely to me that it could occur on an X60 Tablet, a regular X60, a T61, a T60, or even computers made by entirely different manufacturers, such as HP or Dell. Similarly, I expect this problem could occur with not only the Verizon WWAN card, but also the one for AT&T/Cingular.

Anyway, bottom line: I swapped the miniPCI cards in their slots. The problem immediately went away. I don't know if there was a software issue here as well (though I have no idea of what it could have been) but there you go.