Spent 3 hours chasing a ghost driver on a fresh Windows install

I had a client bring in a Dell Optiplex last Tuesday that wouldn't connect to WiFi. Simple enough, right? I reinstalled the driver from Dell's site, rebooted, still nothing. Checked device manager, saw the adapter was working fine but with a yellow bang. Spent another hour downloading different versions of the driver and even tried the Intel update utility. Finally, I noticed the physical WiFi switch on the side of the case was flipped off. Felt like a total bonehead. Has anyone else had a hardware switch or BIOS setting waste way too much of their time?

2 comments

2 Comments

bailey.sam1mo agoMost Upvoted

Oh man, that WiFi switch has bitten me too, I stared at a yellow bang for an hour before I spotted mine.

nina1801mo ago

The one that got me years ago was a laptop that had a hidden BIOS setting for "WLAN Auto Switching" that was toggled off by default. The network card showed up fine in Windows but it would never actually connect to anything. No yellow bangs, no errors, just wouldn't grab an IP address. I had to dig through three layers of advanced menus under some random "System Configuration" tab to find it. The scariest part is that different manufacturers hide these settings in completely different places. One person's Dell might have it under "Wireless" while another's Lenovo buries it under "Power Management." And if you restore defaults it sometimes flips that setting back off without warning.