What wireless card is in this Dell laptop?
 

Repairing a Dell Latitude D600 laptop, XP Pro Corp.

The guy who uses it bought a wireless card for it a while back. He had recent troubles (not related), so I took it home to fix it. While sitting there, it hit me that this D600 most likely had a wireless adapter already in it, just like every other D600 in the building.

I checked Dell.com for drivers, but as you can see...

http://support.dell.com/support/down...os=WW1&osl=EN#

... it's quite useless and ambiguous.

- I've checked Device Manager (says NETWORK, indicating that it's there, but gives no details)
- I've checked the BIOS (says a few things about wireless, that's it)
- I checked with SIW
- I checked with SiSoft Sandra

No luck finding out what card this has, if any, yet I'm fairly sure it does.

I'm not a computer expert, but I did a quick search on Google and found several different adapters associated with the D600, so it's possible there isn't one standard card which is always installed on that system.

My Dell laptop has openable panels on the underside, one of which exposes the wireless card, which is labelled with the adapter number. Have you tried that?

Every Dell machine has a service tag# and an Express service code on it. Look for those, and then go to support.dell.com. From there, go to warranty information, click on the original system information and then enter the service code. Doing so will lookup the computer in Dell's database and return the information which you are looking for.

The wireless cards in that model are either Intel or the Dell based cards.

It didn't occur to me that the panel labeled "C" was for this purpose. I knew M was Memory, so I popped open the only other panel (C), and there she was. After some Googling, I discovered it was the Intel (R) PRO/Wireless 2200 chipset. The only problem is, one of the wires to it came off. Guess I'll resolder that. Thanks Sharon :)

Bendsley - I've never had luck with those for some reason. They're just as good as just selecting the model of the computer, which again leads to the ambiguous results :(

Yup. It probably just comes back with "Wireless Adapter":rolleyes:

Had the same issue a few weeks ago looking for video drivers for an Inspiron 5000. So, I downloaded all three choices and just tried each one to see which would work.

Our company likes to have totally standardized units so we pay extra to have less functionality alot of the times. We didn't want people with WiFi initially so while most got D600s with Wifi in them we paid to have them removed.

Then suddenly we wired the building with WiFi adapters all over the place and they stopped that practice.

The dell service tag numbers identify our units quite well. Tells me all about the machine if there's actually a WiFi card in there or not and exactly which drivers to use.

I wonder why you have difficulty with it.

My experience is that if the system is custom or a business unit, the service tag tends to be accurate. The mass-market versions where parts are multi-sourced tend not to be. Networking, especially wireless, is where I've seen the service tag/express code become useless or even wrong.