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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?

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You could try installing a driver for the card from the Intel Download Center. Or you could try downloading a driver from Dell; at Driver issue Centrino Advanced-N 6205 & Windows 7 Intel recommends "using the drivers specifically from Dell since those have been tested with your system configuration and may have been customized." Go to the Dell Support site, put in the Dell service tag, which should be on the underside of the laptop, and Dell should provide links to drivers for your laptop.

Often times a manufacturer will provide a diagnostic utility with the driver they provide. At the Intel Download Center link, download the appropriate driver for your operating system, but not the "driver only" version; get one that is described as "Intel PROSet/Wireless WiFi Software (includes Drivers)". You may find a diagnostic utility from Intel within the downloaded file.

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  • after installing intel's wifi tool and going through their troubleshooting it suggested to switch on the wireless hardware switch - although it was on, I anyway tried switching it off and on again, now it works, thx
    – peter
    Jul 31, 2015 at 8:42

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