Hi all,

A friend of a friend asked for my help yesterday, and I completely failed at fixing their problem.
They have a computer (old 1.2GHz, 256mb RAM) running Win XP (can't recall if it was home or pro, I'm guessing home) which used to work fine with their USB wireless dongle. Then they moved house and it stopped working, so they bought a new one and asked if I could install it for them. Easy, I thought.

I tried first with he old dongle, but accoring to Device Manager, it couldn't find the correct drivers.
The USB dongle was a Tenda wireless dongle (W311U), I installed the driver and the Tenda wireless config stuff, restarted the PC, then inserted the USB stick. Windows went "oh, somethings just been shoved in me", then went "oh bugger, how do I use it?".
Opening up the Tenda config software showed that the USB dongle wasn't attached. Device Manager said otherwise, but did state that it didn't know what driver to use.
After running an ethernet cable over the banisters, across the hall at neck hight, into the living room and then into the router, I could get the computer online to look for drivers, but Windows found none...
I had a look around, but mainly found problems relating to getting it to work on Linux. I did check that the Windows Zero Confg service was running, and it's set up to come on automagically.

So I'm somewhat lost as to what to do now, it looks like a Window configuration issue rather than a hardware failure, but I've no idea where to go next...I also don't have easy access to the computer, but said I'd ask some people and see what we could come up with...

Many thanks,
Ben

Have you tried disabling the tenda software on startup and then use the windows config?

They can be a bit troublesome, I've had to hunt around and manually update drivers for mine (not a Tenda BTW) and not use any accompanying software just to get it to work on windows 7.

Sorry forgot to mention that, I did uninstall all of the Tenda stuff, then just install the driver, but Windows just wasn't seeing it in Network Connections, and still saying it had no driver in Device Manager.

Since it's probably quite old, the driver software might not know about Windows Wireless Zero Configuration and is trying to configure itself? Is there a configuration application? If so, disable WZC and use that instead.

It's really important that the wireless isn't trying to be managed by two different things...

Also, check what service pack Windows is on. The wireless was changed quite a lot as I recall. SP1 was a longtime ago though.

It was on SP3.

Hmmm, turning WZC off might have been an idea...

Aye, they can try and interfere with one another, maybe switch off any windows config and work directly with the software.