I got my ole lady an HP DX8000 Laptop a couple of years ago so she would leave my gaming rig alone. She doesn't do much with it but email and streaming Oprah. My 14 year old dropped the laptop oneday and I had to get it repaired. While in there I had them ad an extra gig of ram so it's now up to 1.5 gigs of ram.
Problem is, now it won't connect to my home wireless router. It just sits there "trying to acquire wireless network" for minutes at a time. We've no more wireless puters in the house so.
1. I diddled with all the settings on the laptop and my Belkin Router. No go.
2. Hooked the puter up vire wire - that worked so laptop is NOT the problem.
3. Tried laptop at another hot spot. It worked fine.
4. Flashed the firmware in the router. No to.
5. Updated the driver for the laptop wireless thingy. No go.
6. Tonight I'm gonna try another laptop to see if they can connect at the house.
In any case, you could connect to your router and change the SSID so your laptop recognizes it as a new connection. Most of the time thats a quick easy fix for things like this.
You might be able to call the manufacture and get some free phone support. If it is not an Intel Mobile processor you might have to use the software that came with the wireless adapter, instead of using Windows XP wireless network configuration.