My girlfriend has an older dell running on xp. It had some corruption and viruses so she booted it from her xp disk that came with it. The system formatted and reinstalled windows. But now when we boot up her pc the only thing on the desktop is the recycle bin. When I click on start everything is there as normal but I cant find the wifi setup. Its like it disapeared. I havent tried hard wiring yet but will today. Anyone have any ideas?
sounds like wireless card driver not installed. is the wireless card builtin, pc card or usb? is there an unknown device or exclamation mark in device manager?
Typically, you have to make sure all of the drivers are installed. If it was the xp disk that came with the laptop, it should have brought it back to factory default. But since it didn't, it sounds like it was a reboot using a different install disk, in which case you have to manually install the drivers and set you computer settings to the way you want it to look. Change properties of the start menu from "Start menu to classical start menu". That will bring back the my computer icon along with the network connections icons.
