Fixing Disappeared intel net link 5100 wifi on
Toshiba Satellite L300 1YA
I've recently had to fix a
Toshiba Satellite L300 1YA
notebook , running the shitty Windows Vista operating
system.
For some reason suddenly the
Net Link 5100 Wi-FI Network
Adapter of the laptop mysteriously disappeared.
The led indicating the device is enabled was blinking the driver
showed properly installed in
Windows -> System and
everything.
Even though that the wireless network scanning in the notebook was
not working.
In networking in System there were two lines showing up with
excalammation mark "!".
To fix the mess it took me 3.5 hours. I tried many things first
logical thing I tried was reinstalling the driver with the latest
available from Intel's website. Anyways this doesn't helped so I
was about to think about other solutions.
What made thinks even worse was that the Vista installed was in
Chineese!, yes you red this correctly chineese. You cannot
imagine what a hell it is to deal with Windows whose language pack
was Chineese ...
The Vista had installed also the Chineese antivirus program
Rising which also provided the system with some weird
firewall and this made the dealing with the problem even more
complicated.
After many tries I finally completely removed the wireless driver
on the system and reinstalled it with the latest version from
Intel's website.
Thanksfully after a couple of reboots and going into save mode the
Intel Net Link 5100 started working again by itself?!
Well you know how things goes with Windows, you never know what
will happen next.
Maybe a lot of notebooks suffer the same weird issue with Wireless
Wi-Fi adapter suddenly stopping to work.
So now you know the solution, remove the driver install it again,
restart and it should be working again.
Hope this quick and dirty article will save somebody an hours of
time to figure it out ...