Question I can't find my wireless drivers.

[Yousef2001]

i actually have a problem regarding my pc wireless drivers

basically, i can't find anything related to my wifi drivers in the device manager.

i have a dell vostro 460, i contacted dell, they decided to not help me because i was out of warranty and told me to call the out of warranty line for help

and i can't really do that.

and the wireless adapter worked before i formatted my pc.

i really need a way to identify what driver will i have to download because when i install random wireless drivers believe me i tried that it just gave me the blue screen of death

any help would be appreciated

thanks.

 

[rgd1101]

https://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en/04/product-support/product/vostro-460/drivers
or are you using os not supported?

 

[AllanGH]

https://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en/04/product-support/product/vostro-460/drivers

https://downloads.dell.com/manuals/...o_desktop/vostro-460_service-manual_en-us.pdf

 

[Yousef2001]

i'm using win 8.1 and i don't know which adapter to download.

 

[AllanGH]

32 bit, or 64 bit?

 

[Yousef2001]

64 bit

 

[AllanGH]

Download the windows 7 64 bit drivers here:

https://downloads.dell.com/network/R285237.exe

Install them and, if it works, you're fine. If you have problems, get into device manager, find the Atheros network adapter entry, right-click on it and select properties. Update the driver by having windows search for the proper driver....Ugh...if you have enough connectivity to get to the Internet, that is.

Dell never published drivers for windows 8x.

 

[AllanGH]

The WiFi hardware you have in that machine is the Atheros Wireless 1525 WLAN Mini Card. Push comes to shove, you can search for later windows drivers by that name.

 

[Yousef2001]

installed them didn't work, and i can't find atheros network adapter in the device manager.

 

[Yousef2001]

i also installed the bluetooth wireless one same thing happened.

 

[AllanGH]

Open the system up, then, and examine the wireless card. There should be a sticker on it identifying it. It may have been swapped-out with a different wireless card, at some point, or the information from Dell is inaccurate.

The wireless card you are looking for should look reasonably similar to the one on this page:

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA4RE5N60508

 

[Yousef2001]

can i identify the wireless adapter without opening up the case ?

 

[AllanGH]

There may be a commandline utility that is available in windows that will read the hardware descriptors and print them to the console screen, but I'm just not aware of what that may be. I tend to stick with using Linux, and those utilities will do you no good.

All I can say is open it up and start looking.