I have a Compaq Presario laptop M2000. Due to the fact that it had slowed down to a crawl, I recently reinstalled Windows XP Home Edition on it from the Operating System disk that came with it.
The installation seemed to go fine, except that now I am no longer able to turn on my wireless connection. (The “on” button for the wireless above the keyboard does nothing.) The icon for the wireless connection that is normally on the taskbar is no longer there.
What makes me think that the problem is more general is that the computer is no longer able to play sound files either. When I click on a sound file, I get a message saying that “there is a problem with your sound device.” I haven’t been able to identify any problem with the sound devices. The laptop played sound files fine before.
Any ideas about what happened to deactivate my wireless and sound device?
This may or may not help, but did you also install any updates to XP?
It sounds to me as if the computer can’t find the drivers for the wireless & sound. Have you gone into the Device Manager to see if the computer is loading the drivers?
You’ll need to install the correct driver for the piece of hardware you have. For example you will need to determine what type of wireless card you have in your machine. (Is it an Intel Wireless card or is it a Broadcom WLAN adapter. An easy way to tell is if your machine has a Centrino sticker then it is going to be the Intel Wifi adapter.
The Windows XP CD doesn’t have the drivers for your machine most likely because your machine came out after XP was released. Anytime you do a complete reinstall from a regular XP CD you will need to visit the manufacturer’s website and obtain the drivers for the specific machine. Windows Update may detect some of the needed drivers, but it won’t get them all sometimes.
Hope that helps.
I’m afraid I am not understanding this exactly. The laptop came with a pre-installed version of Windows XP. I reinstalled with the same Operating System CD that came with the machine (with a 2005 date on it). Shouldn’t the drivers be the same?
Are you sure you used the same media. Some OEMs package a customized XP disc or a second disc with drivers. Regardless, you need to get those device drivers installed.
control panel > system>hardware>device manager>click on device heading
See what the system has tagged as your wireless and sound devices.
Download and install the appropriate drivers. You may need to force installation of the corrrect driver (right click on the listed hardware device ) as in some cases the OS wants to hold on to the old driver.