Note: I do not have the hardware in question in front of me at the moment, so I'm sorry for the unavailability of some information. I understand if I can't get a proper answer because of that.
Background: I am the IT department for my employer. Recently, the company agreed to sell one of our spare laptops (refurb. Lenovo L520) to an employee. I wiped the machine, then installed Win 7 Pro from DVD (the discs that came with it from the reseller).
The Problem: Windows is not detecting the wireless NIC. To the best of my knowledge, it is an Intel Centrino N-1000 Mini-PCIe half card. However, it simply does not exist in the Device Manager, not even as an unknown device. When I booted the machine into a live Kali system (if you're not familiar with Kali, it's a Debian-based distro), Kali saw and could use the NIC without fail. It even detected if the wireless was disabled through the laptop's hardware switch. This leads me to believe that this is a Windows problem, but not driver-related. I saw this SE question as well, but the machine has had no updates performed since Windows was re-installed.
Despite knowing of the problem, the machine's new owner took it home. He is now complaining about the lack of wireless connectivity. Does anyone have a theory as to the cause of the problem? Ideally, I'd like to be able to have the owner test this theory (he is just knowledgeable enough to be dangerous) and hopefully implement a solution. Thankfully, the Ethernet NIC is still working, so download-dependent solutions are possible.
