Eddie On Everything

Getting My Dell’s Wireless Card to Work With Windows Vista

April 23, 2007 on 2:16 pm | In windows vista | No Comments

My status as a business owner scored me a free copy of Microsoft Windows Vista Business Edition. Because of all of the terrible things I’ve heard about Vista, I’ve kept it sitting on a shelf - until today. My morning was free, so I thought I’d install Vista on a Dell Inspiron 5150 laptop that recently became useless, owe to the fact that the latest Ubuntu release broke my wireless. (But that’s another story…)

The Vista install was fairly painless. The only problem I had was that Vista (like the new Ubuntu) was unable to use my wireless card. When I asked Windows Vista to “Diagnose” the problem for me, it suggested that I:

“Turn on wireless capability”

Gee, thanks, Vista. If I knew how to do that, I wouldn’t have asked!

Fortunately, I was able to discover the solution. Now, the way that the Dell 5150 is *supposed* to work is that hitting “fn-F2″ is supposed to turn the wireless card on and off. Unfortunately for me, however, fn-F2 does absolutely nothing for me.

To remedy the problem, I made a simple change in the BIOS. First, I rebooted the computer, then hit “F2″ to get into the BIOS. Once inside, I navigated to the page that contained my onboard wireless card’s settings, and changed the mode to “Application” controlled.

After restarting the computer, Vista was able to find my wireless card, and everything is now running smoothly.