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General discussion

DELL 1558 Laptop wireless card issue driving me crazy

Dec 3, 2010 1:57PM PST

I have a Dell Studio laptop(Studio 155Cool with a DW1520 Wireless N WLAN half mini card(Broadcom) that is intermittently switching off wireless on start-up under Windows 7. If a connection is made at start-up it works fine however every one in three start-ups fails to initiate wireless (I see a red cross over the wireless bars in the system tray). To date I have tried the following however none of these solve the problem.

1. FN + F2. Nothing happens
2. Launching the Dell Windows Mobility Centre by pressing [Windows Key + x] to switch the wireless hardware radio on and off .
3. Unchecked "allow the computer to turn off this device to save power" under power management
4. Restarting the WLansvc service

I have also installed the latest Dell Wireless WLAN 1520 Half MiniCard Driver (Version: 5.30.21.0, A01, Release Date: 10/7/2009) from the Dell Support Site.
The laptop has Win7 Professional 64-bit version.

At present my only solution is to repeat restarting the laptop until I regain a wireless network connection.

I did notice that whenever it fails either the wireless device does not show up in Device manager at all and sometimes shows up with an error symbol indicated. When I saw in properties(when shown in device manager with error) for the error message it showed "This device cannot find enough free resources that it can use. (Code 12)
If you want to use this device, you will need to disable one of the other devices on this system."

Is there any easy way to determine whether this is a hardware fault or software configuration with my network card? The problem is intermittent and does not happen on every startup which is confusing. I know that the BIOS or the Windows OS is causing this issue, but I am unable to pinpoint the cause for failure. Any suggestions or ideas would be appreciated.

Discussion is locked

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What I don't understand is when I looked at dell.com
Dec 3, 2010 3:07PM PST

Dell Wireless WLAN 1520 Half MiniCard
Release Date: 5/27/2010

Here's my bet. Someone installed Windows Pro 7 and didn't finish the install. I'm just guessing that and could be wrong. Maybe the BIOS and drivers are out of date for a reason?
Bob

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PS. More about finding your machine's drivers.
Dec 3, 2010 4:14PM PST

Hint: Dell.com, your service tag #.

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same problem
Jan 11, 2011 9:56PM PST

Drivers are surely up to date, and all downloaded from support.dell.com, entering service tag.

Maybe already anybody solved this problem?

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Solved...
Jan 11, 2011 11:12PM PST

This problem got solved finally....I called the DELL support and they replaced the wireless card (of course was still under warranty). Now there is absolutely no problem. I am guessing either it was a faulty wireless card OR the connectors weren't connected properly to the wireless card.
Thanks all for the replies/solutions.

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Solution found
Apr 1, 2011 3:25AM PDT

Fresh install of Windows 7 x64 did not correct the problem, flashing the BIOS did not correct the problem, replacing the internal wireless card did not correct the problem, Installing all drivers, updates, patches, etc. from Support.Dell.com did not correct the problem!

SOLUTION: Enter the BIOS setup (Press F2 at start up). Go to to the "Advanced" tab, select Wireless, change Wireless (Switch)/(Hotkey) to NONE.

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This solution does work.
Mar 30, 2012 12:51AM PDT

My dell studio 1558 has linux and windows partitions setup and neither windows nor linux would connect to the wifi card. After changing the BIOS setup as described (from ALL to NONE) the card was turned on and worked fine under both operating systems. I couldn't access BIOS as on most computers with F2 on startup but F12 worked (this may have to do with GRUB being installed for the double OS boot and F2 might work for you). Do not let anyone try to make you recover your system! You will lose all your data for nothing. You can download a Linux USB distribution and test to see if it detects wifi without installing it on your computer. If it doesn't and the above fix doesn't work and you have switched out wireless cards then you probably have a bad board.