Inspiron N7010 WiFi gone west!

I've been using my trusty laptop (Inspiron with Win7) for better than a year now, with no untoward difficulties.

Suddenly, today, poof! The WiFi adapter just 'isn't there'.

I was browsing BBC News Olympic stuff, when the internet connection failed. Nothing unusual there - I live in a 'bad reception area', but when that problem manifests itself, I get at least a message in IE, and the problem 'goes away' after a while. (curiously enough, these kind of failures occur during times of bad weather - I didn't know that raindrops could affect the kind of transmission spectrum in use here :) )

This time around, IE tells me that I'm not connected to a network.

Looked around and saw the 'Internet Access' icon in the system tray featured a red 'X'. Clicked on that and could not see the network name (from a Sky Broadband D-Link router) did not feature in the list. Restarted the laptop and there was no change. I'm now reduced to using a T-Mobile 'dongle'.

I have another laptop here - my 'work' one - and that is working fine on the Sky network. Also my Windows-based Nokia mobile is not having any difficulties with internet access - not sure if that's applicable, though...

I've tried toggling the laptop antenna with the 'Fn-F2' key-pair, but get no difference there. How do you tell anyway? There's no separate indication that the antenna is 'on' or 'off'.

Anyone got any further ideas? Is my laptop truly 'broken' in this regard? How can I check further?

Thanks in advance

John