Inspiron 1525 wireless card not working

Hi Inspiron1525user

Welcome to the community,

It seems you have not installed the drivers for your I 1525 laptop.  The network controller driver is  the wireless driver which is not currently installed.

Please install the driver for the wireless card using this link:

www.Support.dell.com

Click on drivers and then put in the service tag and select windows OS which is installed on the computer.

Under network you will find the drivers for the wireless card.

You need to install the driver for the card which is installed in your laptop.

If in case you are not able to figure it out, please add me as a friend and then PM me the service tag for your laptop I will; get you the current drivers.

Note: Once the driver is   installed you need to use the wireless switch in order to scan for the Network .

The Inspiron 1525 system ships with a wireless feature called the wireless switch. It is located on the right side of the system. To scan for a Wi-Fi wireless LAN, slide and hold the switch in the momentary position for a few seconds. The Wi-Fi Catcher network locator works whether the computer is turned on or off, in Hibernate mode, or in Standby mode, as long as the switch is configured through Quickset or the BIOS to control Wi-Fi network connections.

Glad to be of assistance.

Ravi Mohindroo

Social Outreach Professional

You can reach us at http://en.community.dell.com/

The wireless button does nothing, no light comes on. As i mentioned I have installed every driver in the correct order including the correct 'network' driver.

Inspiron1525user,

Places to look to see if your Connection is enabled

Rick

creasey318,

Just go follow the list, desktop/notebook system utility, then the chipset drivers and things will start working.

Rick

I'm having the to the problem, I had to format the hard drive, re-install windows and although I have the disk drives and also installed everything the netwoek drivers were not loaded, I downloaded all the drives from dell support website, I'm able to connet to the internet pluged directly but NOT wireless.  Please Help! 

junycuqui,

When you reinstalled the operating system, did you install the Dell System Software(if applicable) and the chipset drivers first? If not, the rest of the drivers will fail to install. How to Download and Install Drivers in the Correct Order

Start with the Dell System Software and the chipset drivers and follow the list.

Rick

 I have done all this w a flash drive. It is saying a wireless network adapter is not installed or software is not installed. I had wireless before I wiped the hard drive

I know it's pretty late to reply to this post, but i'm certain my solution works so it might help out a lot of people in the future. I'm not even a DELL user, but happened to change the OS on a friend's DELL Inspiron 1525 laptop from Windows Vista to Windows 8.1

The installation went fine except that the WiFi refused to work. It was detected in Device Manager but if I tried to scan for networks it would tell me that no networks were available. I searched all over the net from my other PC for an answer without much luck. One person advised me to check if my BIOS was the latest version. So I went to  http://support.dell.com  and entered the service tag to find there was an update available. Using a USB drive, i transferred the file to the laptop and updated it. After restarting, the problem was still the same. The WIFI icon was there in the system tray but it still didn't allow me to scan for any networks. Just like before.

So i thought I'd fiddle around in the actual BIOS to see if anything could help me. Restarted the PC, went into BIOS and immediately noticed that there was a section called WIRELESS. In it, i located an option regarding the control of the wireless devices being connected to the wireless switch. It was set to ON (which meant that the switch on the side of the laptop, as well as the Fn+Function key held a certain amount of control over the device). I turned the setting to OFF (thus removing any control of the WIFI by that switch).

Restarted the PC and like magic, it was working fine.

Further research on the issue thru Google seems to indicate that Windows 8 (and even Windows 7 & Vista in certain cases) have problems in taking exclusive control over the WiFI in these sort of systems. So my advice to everyone is do both the things I did:

1) First update your BIOS if it is available (so that you have all the options accessible)

2) Then enter BIOS and disable the option that allows the Wireless Switch or the Function keys to have any control over the WiFi

Hope this will be useful to others. I just created an account here so that i could share the information. Cheers! :)