Thinkpads Forum

My 600X was using an Airlink 811g Cardbus wireless adapter under XP with no problem. Because of USB port problems, I got rid of XP and went with a clean install of Win2000, SP4, with security Rollup added on. Now when I try to set up the Airlink card, I can't because in the Network connection utility it says, "Network card unplugged." If I run ipconfig.exe I get this message: "Ethernet Adapter Local Area Connection; Media state: cable disconnected." I hooked up an old Netgear USB wireless adapter, and got the same error message. The adapters are functional.

I know there is no ethernet card in a 600X, so the 'unplugged' message must mean something else. I've done a lot of googling and none of the remedies (drivers, reload this and that) work. One suggestion is to disable Media Sensing, but that didn't work either.

Aargh! Any ideas out there? I can't go back to XP - the USB sound card is more important than the wireless card.

TIA - Chuck

This computer has win-98 on it but I think I've seen "network cable disconnected" on some Xp laptops I've played with when the network card had not connected to a host. Do you get the airlink or netgear (Depending on which card you are using) icon in the system tray? You may simply need to remind it of the ssid and ad-hoc channel of your network (Which by the way should be in infrastructure network)

With Windows eXtra Painful win-zero wi-fi thingy is supposed to do that but with many older versions you have to manually connect to the network

(I also just fought my daughter's computer into submission, long distance, on this very same issue... I knew I'd seen that "network cable unplugged" with wi-fi, SHE had it, hers is a Dell Desktop using usb to hook up to a linksys wifi client and a 2-wire router/dsl modem)

Note: With some versions of windows, after you connect to the network you need to release the IP assignments and RENEW them

To do so open a command (dos) prompt and type

ipconfig /release_all or ipconfig /release * (depending on your version)
ipconfig /renew_all or ipconfig /renew * (again depending on version)

I use the first on the 98se laptop and the 2nd on daughter's xp box