.... I'm stumped... any ideas?

[truromeo4juliet]

Imagine waking up one day and none of your network adapters are functioning... ethernet, wireless, bluetooth, 1394... none work...

So you check your device manager, and everything is listed as "Unknown" ... not "Unknown Device" with the little yellow question mark, but "Unknown" like the symbol for non plug-and-play devices...

you try to reinstall your hardware, but to no avail... uninstall, reboot, reinstall, no luck... install chipset drivers... no luck... you even resort to windows system restore... no luck... what do you do?

here's the deal... I'm a computer tech, and a very good friend of mine brought me her laptop this afternoon after her babysitter freed himself on it for a night or two... none of her network adapters were working when she got it back... I looked at it, and the above scenario is what I've found... included is a picture with the symptoms I'm describing... please help, she can't afford to reinstall windows (she's missing program disks)... thanks

PS - yes, this is a double post... I put this in the Networking topic area, and the hardware area as well, because not everyone reads both and I'd like to get this resolved as soon as possible... thanks

 

[Darth_Indy]

Have you tried going back to a restore point?

Run in safe mode with networking?

What have you installed in the last week or so? (any sw or BIOS or adapters or... anything?)

Did you run anti-virus and spyware scans?


Have you run Windows Repair from the CD?

 

[truromeo4juliet]

i had to do a destructive system restore (tablet XP) i hate doing that, but she was really time crunched... saved her data, destructive system restore, move data back, resetup programs and import settings... good as new

 

[Darth_Indy]

I'm glad you got it running... bummer about having to do the restore. Clearly the hardware was working.