Problem with Dell D610

Hi Last year, I purchased a refurbished Dell D610 laptop for my two daughters to share. Until now, the computer has worked like a charm but it will no longer connect to my router which is a Linksys WRT-546. The message I am receiving on the laptop is; "a network cable is unplugged". The router is working just fine (we have another laptop that still connects). I'm assuming the wireless network card has gone bad. Not really sure whether to replace the card with the same,or just purchase a card to insert in the card slot and if so, am I better off going with a Linksys since I already have a Linksys router? Thank you for your replies.

Hi and welcome to WhatTheTech. Well, "a network cable is unplugged" does not deal with your wireless network (which uses no cables). It means literally what it says, "a network cable is unplugged." If this laptop was hard wired to your router, you could expect that message to go away. Until then, a network cable IS unplugged. Instead, lets ignore that message because it is unrelated, and focus on the wireless adapter. Most laptop wireless adapters can be turned off by a special hotkey on the keyboard. This means that you press and hold the FN key and press one of the other buttons to enable/disable the wireless adapter. On your laptop the wireless hotkey is F2 and is designated by a graphic of a tower with radio signals emitting from it. Therefore, the first thing to try is to press and hold the FN key and press the F2 key to try and re-enable the wireless adapter. If you still have a problem with the wireless adapter, click control panel -> network connections. Right-click the wireless adapter and click enable if the option is present. You might have to go back and press the FN+F2 hotkey again after this to enable/disable the adapter. Let us know how it goes.

Nice to meet you, Ken and thanks for the reply. I'll try it and let you know how it went.

Problem solved!! Ken, you are the man. I'm not worthy.

I'm happy for you.. I sure like it when it is something easy..

I'm a problem solver. Been looking at wireless cards for the last few weeks but something didn't sit right with me. I can usually figure out the problems but in this case, I couldn't find the answers I was looking for so I found your forum instead. Too often we dole out money for stuff we don't need. I hope I can help a few folks on this forum and make my stay here useful.