(S O L V E D ! ! !) HP Pavillion DV-6000 Wireless Not Working - Actual Model DV-6607NR

[Farqnart]

I have spent large parts of several days trying to figure out this problem with the wireless not working. The switch on the front of the body that is supposed to switch wireless on or off seemed to not be working. Regardless of flipping it towards the orange light or the opposite way towards the symbol that, to me, stands for Wireless Signal which is a little antenna looking thing with two parethesis on each side, presumably showing that it's brodcasting or receving a wifi or wireless signal. 

I recall having this issue before, but it resolved much faster then, and I didn't think to make notes at the time.

I read or skimmed over virtually every post that came up on HP support when searching for "DV-6000 Wireless not working" and they all rang at least one of three bells.

1. A motherboard problem that HP knows about and in the past has warranted. 

2. A bad driver or the wrong driver

3. HP Products are crap and you should burn them with your bras.

I even saw the YouTube video showing how a guy had the same problem. He bought a tiny USB wireless adapter and hard wired it to a USB port internally, running a wire under the keyboard and into the area where the existing wireless card is. This was interesting, intuitive, and quite a feat of home engineering. Applause to you for a solid option.

Also there was an idea that you could stick the laptop in the oven and magically all the solder connections would reanimate and go to their assigned locations, therefore rendering the laptop better than new. As soon I wasa able to get an extension cord over to the oven I was spotted and slapped on the hand for not marinating it first. Afterall this has been a tough issue.

Moving on. I farted around and tried everything. It's very important to write down the steps you take and what the results are so that you have a record of how to duplicate it in the future. As with any Windows machine I find myself doing a full cleanout every few months which includes a fresh install of windows. Not a recovery, not an image, and preferably not a copy from the original discs.

With that said, I am running Windows Vista with Service Pack 2.

I installed a fresh copy of Windows Vista SP2

Restart Windows

Then I installed SP42635.EXE from HP downloads. I rename this, adding Graphics Driver in front of SP42635 so that I know in the future.

Restart Windows

Then I installed SP41675 which again I rename, adding Broadcom Wifi in front of SP41675

I then get the Blue Light instead of the Orange light, and then I am able to connect to wifi. 

Restart Windows

I then installed SP36213 which I think is described as a Chipset driver, which I still don't understand the significance, but upon installing it shows that it will install the driver for the LAN device along with two other things I am unsure of. I chose all three. This gave me LAN connectivity. I tested by switching off the wifi with the switch. After maybe 30 seconds the wired LAN connection was recognized and I got twice the speed of the wifi connection as expected.

Restart Windows

I then tried the wifi switch to be sure it was still working. It was. I left it in the blue position and also have the LAN cable plugged in. I'm not sure which one defaults, but I would guess LAN.

-A few notes on this.

 1. My switch is installed backwards in my opinion. Mine has to be switched to the right, which is toward the now blue light. This is the wireless ON position. 

2. I only found out that I needed the Broadcom Driver by going to the Device Manager and looking at the devices. I saw Network Adapters which I expanded on and saw NVIDIA nForce Networking Controller. I deduced that this was probably the LAN driver. I specifically did not see another network adapter listed in that category or any other. Below that was a category named Other Devices. Expanded on that there were several Base System Device and a couple of Unknown Device. All of these had little yellow tirangles with an exclamation mark on them. I presumed this meant they were not working. I looked at the properties of the bottom one and I don't recall what it said, but it led me to believe that is the wireless device. I clicked on the properties of it and theres a tab where you can see the driver status was showing not installed. I told it to look for the driver. I selected to look on the internet for it. It took several minutes of sitting there and doing nothing as far as I knew, but I walked away for a few minutes and came back to a message saying the driver was installed. 

I then looked back at the network adapters category and now the Broadcom 802.11b/g WLAN was showing. This is what lead me to know that I needed that specific driver in the future. 

I then located that driver, which was associated with my model number alomg with a couple others that were not what I had. It was finding out that I had a broadcomm device that was the key. 

I wanted to be sure that I knew how to replicate this so I installed a fresh copy of windows again and went through the above steps with success. 

As for the other opinions from 1, 2, and 3 I don't know what to say. I'm inclined to believe that HP knows how to direct customers to install the correct driver but they choose not to because it may be too expensive to write a solution for it. In turn the customer calls the help desk and is helped sucessfully when under warranty, helped at a cost out of warranty, sold a new motherboard for $400. which is then going to work because the technician will have access to the right processes to get it running. 

How many people paid $400., how many bought a new laptop under the guise that its just worn out or old, and how many just gave up after paying for technical help?  All ways HP wins on this one.

In my head the whole time I was telling myself I should open it up and phycially see which card I had, but I didn't. If I did, I would have saved a bunch of time.

I'd like to give thanks to the program called HP Wireless Assistant SP36670 which when installed gave me an idea about looking in the device manager again, but in the end the program is unnecessary for me. 

Good luck, hope it works for you!

Farqnart