Skie88

Alrighty, well here's the gist of things, so to speak.

About a week and a half ago, my friend had come over to my house to visit and exchange some data. I had a few ISO's he wanted to get from me so he setup his external harddrive and connected it to my laptop via USB.

The task at the time was to transfer about 14.3 GB of data. Since this was obviously going to take a decent amount of time, we decided to play a few games. Obviously we got carried away and wound up playing for over a few hours while the initial data transfer we were waiting for took somewhere between ten to twenty minutes.

Getting back to the point... After we had finished our game, I turned to my laptop only to notice a rather peculiar and odd thing; which was that the Wi-Fi light, normally blue, was red.

No big deal, I thought. Perhaps maybe I had bumped the switch and turned the wifi off at some point, however unlikely that would seem. So I messed with that switch a bit, moving it to the "off" position and then back to the "on" position. It didn't revive it, so I decided to restart the laptop. As soon as everything loaded, still a red light. At this point I decided to take a peek at the Device Manager in XP. Sure enough, there was no Broadcom driver listed anywhere, instead there was a question mark floating around a new device, "Unknown Device".

"Maybe the drivers had corrupted somehow", my friend told me. I shrugged and decided to tinker with it, uninstalling the unknown equipment and running my Wifi Driver file supplied directly from the HP website. Strangely enough, when I ran the program, the device failed to install properly every time. Rather than giving me an installation program to navigate, I would see a command prompt flash up briefly only to disappear and the "Unknown Device detected" windows XP prompt to come up in its place.

I'm baffled beyond anything right now as to why this is happening to my laptop, hence why I am here asking you guru's for any possible knowledge and insight. If you would be so kind as to help me out. Thanks in advance.

Also, I'd like to note the fact that a week or so prior to this possible device failure, my laptop may have been stepped on by one or all three of my friend's 10 year old brats he's forced to call brothers. I don't think they stepped on it personally, since there is literally no physical damage that can be seen anywhere on the exterior, but I can't rule this out. Especially considering that this laptop is only 10 months old and is very well maintained.

One more thing, if you need anymore information to help diagnose my possible problem, please do not hesitate to ask me for I will surely provide it

Thanks again,
-Skie

Edit: I also failed to mention one more thing, in that was that I also have just tried to reformat my laptop, thinking that might have fixed the problem. Sadly this has not helped to alleviate any of my wifi dilemma.

TheMatt

Hi Skie,

My initial thought is that the wireless card was bumped out of its socket. Most wireless cards are socketed in Mini PCI or Mini PCIe slots. Have you ever opened up the laptop, and is the laptop still under warranty?

Skie88

Well I thought that it could be disconnected too, so I just got around to opening it up once again today to check the wifi card. It looked like it was seated properly, but I disconnected it and reconnected it just now. Sadly, it still doesn't work. It still also wouldn't explain as to why the computer was still detecting the device, but labeling it as an "unknown device". Pretty much my conclusion to this whole thing is that the card itself must have taken a dive for the worse.

I was checking around though and thankfully my laptop is still under warranty, for the next twenty days at least. I'll probably wind up sending an e-mail or calling up HP and requesting to them that they send me a replacement.

But thats just my own conclusion. What about your own thoughts?

TheMatt

Yeah, usually "Unknown Device" usually indicates that the device itself is bad. I would send it in for repair.