by silverarrow » Thu Mar 24, 2011 2:37 pm
Is there a way to check the wireless drivers really are installed where they should be? Is the wireless detected at all?
I reinstalled XP from CD and there was a separate driver CD and installation wizard that fixed all hardware drivers pretty easily. Luckily driver CD worked in Windows 7 too. If it isn't the drivers it might be something with the wireless card. Have you tried booting up in a live linux CD just to check if the wireless hardware is all right? It usually detects wireless instantly. Or if you have Puppy linux, there's lots of options for activating and detecting wireless cards.
I see you have had major trouble with your computer lately. I had some of the problems you mention with my fujitsu amilo; like getting stuck formatting, and stuck during installation process of OS and all got solved when I replaced the harddrive. It wasn't too obvious at first, but it was all gone bad. Somehow Ubuntu manage to install when XP didn't, butstill had problems with booting after a short while and wasn't stable at all. Point is, it might be worth checking the hard drive for errors too.