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General discussion

Cannot add hardware after removing wireless card

Sep 13, 2004 4:59AM PDT

My laptop account is limited and when I bought a Belkin wireless card, I had to get the adminstrator at work to install it because I didn't have sufficient priviledges. The card worked fine until one day I removed it to try in my wife's laptop. When I reinserted it I got the same error message - you have to be part of the administrator's group to add hardware.

I had to get my IT guy to log on as an administrator to add the card but is there any way of avoiding this problem? I did think that the machine was switched off when I removed the card in the first place. How does the OS know I took the card out?

Discussion is locked

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Re: Cannot add hardware after removing wireless card
Sep 14, 2004 1:42AM PDT

You don't say what OS your laptop is using.
windows XP, 2000, 95, 98 & ME are plug & play OS's, they detect the card upon boot up and load the necc driver if it is already installed on the computer.
Windows NT is not plug & play.
However, once the driver is installed on the machine, then the device should work even after it has been removed & re-installed. Does your laptop have more than one PCMCIA (card) socket-if you replaced the card in the other socket, then the machine will need the driver reloading, once done though the machine should work fine

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Re: Cannot add hardware after removing wireless card
Sep 14, 2004 1:55AM PDT

OS is Win XP Pro. There are 2 PCMCIA slots but I think that the wireless card was inserted into the same slot each time. Is it normal for the OS to request an adminstrator to log on each time?

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Is it normal for the OS to request an adminstrator.........
Sep 14, 2004 2:16AM PDT

" Is it normal for the OS to request an adminstrator to log on each time? "

Yes. But your IT set that policy. Since it's not our machine we have to deal with the IT staff.

Bob

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Re: Is it normal for the OS to request an adminstrator......
Sep 14, 2004 7:07AM PDT

once the drivers are installled by an administrator then the machine should not be asking for the driver every time the card is removed and replaced (presuming the driver has been installed on both pcmcia ports). as you are unable to change anything on the machine i would advise you to refer back to your own IT dept for an explanation.