I have a cheap TrendNet wireless card for my Dell desktop (XPS-410), which runs Vista Home Premium. As far as Vista is concerned, the card does not exist. I can’t even get as far as attempting a driver install, since the driver installer can’t find the card. Here’s what I’ve tried so far:
Re-inserted the card in three different PCI slots.
Checked BIOS, which can see the card and correctly registers it as an Ethernet card.
Checked Device Manager, which has no knowledge of the card, not even as a non-functional device.
Run “Add New Hardware”, which asserts that it can find no new hardware to install.
Run the driver install, which asks me to “Please insert the card before installing drivers” - the card is already inserted.
Put the card in my friend’s computer, running XP Pro, which can see it just fine and installs native drivers.
So, what am I missing? I’ll keep doing some Googling of tech support sites, but do any of you knowledgeable Dopers have any ideas? Anything you can suggest would be greatly appreciated.
Buy a card that has Vista support, seriously. There are many, many devices that do not have Vista drivers and will never have Vista drivers. I recently had similar problems. The solution was a $24 802.11g wireless card that was fully supported by Vista, even in 64-bit mode.
Well, the card manufacturer (TrendNet) asserts that is is Vista capable, and supplies a Vista driver for it. I just can’t even get as far as installing a driver, since Windows appears not to know that the card even exists.
Assuming the hardware is working properly, I’d check to see if the motherboard BIOS is the most recent version, and I’d tell it to “reset to defaults”, in case there is a improper setting in the BIOS or a corrupted CMOS configuration.
Have you tried downloading the newest drivers from the manufacturer, those cards have been around for a while and you may have one that shipped with a prototype vista driver that didn’t work.
The bolded part is an interesting question. The card could simply be dead. Even new cards are sometimes DOA. Do you have another box you can try it in?
I’d expect even non-Vista compatible cards to at least show up as bad or unknown in the Device Manager. Although it is odd the BIOS sees and identifies it. Still, my next step would be to try it in another box. If it doesn’t work there, time for a new card.
Very weird. And it could be a driver problem, but I don’t see how it could be the driver for this card that’s the problem, since you’re never getting to the point where you can even install the driver.
So if it’s a driver, it’s some other driver. Maybe an unused one, or one for another device that is interfering with this card responding on the PCI bus.
Do you have any other PCI cards plugged in that you can temporarily remove and see if that allows this new card to be recognized? If so, you may have a resource conflict. And it’s possible that if the wireless card is configured and operating when you re-insert the conflicting card, it may get a new configuration that doesn’t conflict.
Vista would not “see” my wireless card either. Even though the BIOS would list it, It needed a newer version of the BIOS before Vista would recognize the card