I'm having problems with my wireless connection. My laptop can't seem to detect any connections, saying only not connected - no connections are available. But that's impossible, as my neighbor laptops could detect the wireless modem we have and all the other random connections floating around. If I connect my laptop to the modem with a wire, Luckily I can get internet, but when I unplug it, same problem persists. please help..thanks

So based on your troubleshooting so far, it seems that you are definately having a problem with the Wifi adapater on the laptop since you can connect via wire and your neighbors laptop works on your network.

Some things to check..

Laptops allow the ability to shut the wireless off in the BIOS. Check if you have a setting to enable it.

Many laptops have a button or a function key to press while the comptuer is on to enable or disable the wifi. Make sure its enabled

While in Windows, go to Device Manager, do you see the Wifi Nic listed? At this pint, since its not working, go ahead and right click to uninstall. After rick click the computer name at the top of the list and rescan. Sometimes, this works when a device is malfunctioning.

next, make sure that you have the latest device drivers. Check on the vendor's site.

If all of this is completed and you still cant get it to detect the wireless network, there is either something wrong with the wireless controller, or something else in the OS is causing this problem.

At this point, you may want to buy an inexpensive usb wifi adapter and call it a day.

Or, you may want to try to repair the OS, or reinstall the OS and see if a clean fresh copy of Windows does the trick.

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