I have an over 4 year old Dell Latitude E6520 with Windows 8.1 (originally). Few days ago the WiFi card (Intel Centrino Advanced-N 6205
) suddenly stopped working. What happened was, I closed the Laptop lid (it worked before that), plugged in my extra battery, opened it - and that's it, since than I didn't manage to get it running again.
I've tried disabling the adapter, restarting, removing the extra battery, looking for new drivers. Today I've upgraded to Windows 10 in hope, new drivers will be installed and it will start working again, but it didn't.
The extra battery is roughly 3 years old and nothing I can think of is new. The Windows device manager can detect the card and shows it as enabled, I just can't find any network with it. There doesn't seem to be anything broken with the card, when looking at the traditional network adapter settings (those from Windows 7).
But looking at the new information from Windows 8 and 10, where you can switch the Airplane mode, it shows that my Wireless devices are turned off, and the button is disabled, I can't switch it to turn it on again.
Any ideas what I could do?
According to the device manager, the card should be fine. I planned my further steps to be reinstalling Windows 10 from scratch, if that doesn't work, installing Linux, and in case that still won't work, I'd just assume the card is actually damaged and I'd try to figure out a way to replace it or similar, but in that case it shouldn't show up as perfectly fine in the device manager, or?
Do you have any ideas what can be done without setting up the laptop from scratch?