NICs are showing up under "Unknown" and not "Network Adapaters'" in device manager

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Gawd
Joined
Nov 6, 2004
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I cannot get the wired ethernet or wireless working at all on this laptop. Under the Device Manager, the Broadcom 440x 10/100 NIC and the Intel Pro/Wireless 2200BG are both under "Unknown Devices". There is no "Network Adapters" like there should be. While it looks like both drivers are installed correctly, Windows doesn't recognize them as network hardware. There is nothing under network connections. I tried uninstalling the drivers from the Device Manger and restarting and XP just reinstalls the drivers and puts them right back under "Unknown". I also tried a system restore to when they did work and they still don't work now.

Any ideas? Anyway I can get "Network Adapters" back in the Device Manager?
 
If they show up as unknown..the drivers are not installed correctly. Remove them...get the proper drives for them...you'll probably have to transfer those drivers over using something like a USB thumb drive. Follow the instructions on installing those drivers.
 
Thanks, I tried all of that. I tried uninstalling them and then running the executables for the drivers, like the ProSet for the Intel wireless and at the end it had green check marks for everything installing correctly. But it was still under "Unknown" and not Network Adapters. So I tried uninstalling and updating the driver by manual installing and directing it to the driver folder... same thing, the name of the hardware is correct but it's always installed under "Unknown" and not Network Adapters.
 
Are these the latest drivers, downloaded from the laptop manufacturers website?

Positive that these drivers are for the correct model and OS?
 
Yeah, I've tried straight from Gateway and straight from Intel. Windows XP Home
 
This one is indeed unusual. You might try booting into safe mode and see if does the same thing. It very likely will, I'm just thinking there may be some other software that could be clobbering your drivers. When that doesn't work, you could try running a Linux Live CD. If that works at least you would know for sure that the hardware was good.
 
what happens when you do select from list, select network adapter, then select the extracted driver location.
 
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