Dell forum: DELL 1558 Laptop wireless card issue driving me crazy

by: suhasrs December 3, 2010 9:57 PM PST

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DELL 1558 Laptop wireless card issue driving me crazy

by suhasrs - 12/3/10 9:57 PM

I have a Dell Studio laptop(Studio 1558) with a DW1520 Wireless N WLAN half mini card(Broadcom) that is intermittently switching off wireless on start-up under Windows 7. If a connection is made at start-up it works fine however every one in three start-ups fails to initiate wireless (I see a red cross over the wireless bars in the system tray). To date I have tried the following however none of these solve the problem.

1. FN + F2. Nothing happens
2. Launching the Dell Windows Mobility Centre by pressing [Windows Key + x] to switch the wireless hardware radio on and off .
3. Unchecked "allow the computer to turn off this device to save power" under power management
4. Restarting the WLansvc service

I have also installed the latest Dell Wireless WLAN 1520 Half MiniCard Driver (Version: 5.30.21.0, A01, Release Date: 10/7/2009) from the Dell Support Site.
The laptop has Win7 Professional 64-bit version.

At present my only solution is to repeat restarting the laptop until I regain a wireless network connection.

I did notice that whenever it fails either the wireless device does not show up in Device manager at all and sometimes shows up with an error symbol indicated. When I saw in properties(when shown in device manager with error) for the error message it showed "This device cannot find enough free resources that it can use. (Code 12)
If you want to use this device, you will need to disable one of the other devices on this system."

Is there any easy way to determine whether this is a hardware fault or software configuration with my network card? The problem is intermittent and does not happen on every startup which is confusing. I know that the BIOS or the Windows OS is causing this issue, but I am unable to pinpoint the cause for failure. Any suggestions or ideas would be appreciated.

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