[WilliamFearless]

Ok, my brother-in-law bought a new laptop from Best Buy yesterday, and he asked me to set it up. I'm A+/Net+ certified and have a few years of troubleshooting experience from my last job and about 13 years experience building and setting up computers. I'm the guy everyone goes to in the family for computer issues, but today, I am pulling my hair out because I've never run across this problem before and I am clueless as to what to do next.

He bought a Gateway NV52 laptop with a 2.10 gigahertz AMD Athlon X2 Dual-Core QL-65 (64-bit) processor, 4 Gigabytes of RAM, 300 Gig hard drive, and a ATI Radeon HD 3200 Graphics display.

So, with this new laptop, I did what was natural- wipe and reformat the hard drive and install a fresh copy of windows. Before I did ANYTHING however, I ran Belarc Advisor upon turning the laptop on for the very first time to get a profile of the computer.

I have a retail disk of Windows Vista Ultimate (64-bit). After delete/create partition and reformatting the hard drive, I installed Vista with no problems.

Then I went to Gateway's website, typed in the laptop's serial number and downloaded all of the device drivers for my computer, put them all on a USB thumbdrive and then put them on the laptop and installed them.

Everything was working fine, video and sound were great and all devices were functioning properly... everything except the network adapters. Even when plugging an ethernet cable into the laptop's ethernet port to connect it to my home network, nothing.

The laptop will not even SEE the ethernet adapter or the wireless network adapter. It's as if they don't exist, whether I install the drivers or not. I ran Belarc Advisor again and it no longer saw either of the network adapters. Nothing I do can get this laptop to acknowledge the fact that it has any network adapters.

Here is the belarc profile when I turned the laptop on for the very first time taking it out of the box:

Communications
HDAUDIO Soft Data Fax Modem with SmartCP

6TO4 Adapter
Atheros AR5B93 Wireless Network Adapter
primary Auto IP Address: 192.168.2.3 / 24
Gateway: 192.168.2.1
Dhcp Server: 192.168.2.1
Physical Address: 0C:60:76:40:41:3F
Broadcom NetLink (TM) Gigabit Ethernet
Dhcp Server: none responded
Physical Address: 00:1F:16:C92:4C
Microsoft ISATAP Adapter (2x)
Teredo Tunneling Pseudo-Interface

Networking Dns Server: 192.168.2.1

And here is the profile after installing a fresh copy of Vista and all of the device drivers:

Communications
HDAUDIO Soft Data Fax Modem with SmartCP

RAS Async Adapter
Physical Address: 20:41:53:59:4E:FF
WAN Miniport (IP)
Physical Address: 10:B3:20:52:41:53
WAN Miniport (IP)-QoS Packet Scheduler-0000
Physical Address: 10:B3:20:52:41:53
WAN Miniport (IPv6)
Physical Address: 10:B3:20:52:41:53
WAN Miniport (IPv6)-QoS Packet Scheduler-0000
Physical Address: 10:B3:20:52:41:53
WAN Miniport (PPPOE)
Physical Address: 33:50:6F:45:30:30
WAN Miniport (PPTP)
Physical Address: 50:50:54:50:30:30

I'm going crazy, I've never seen this problem before. How can it not SEE the network adapters at all? After installing all the drivers even?

[Mumbodog]

Some laptops have applications that need to be installed before some hardware can be accessed by drivers or the OS. If this is the case, it has to be installed first.

Since I do not have the serial (don't post it), I cannot look at what is available for that model at Gateway, can you provide a link to the drivers/software page the serial generates?

[TerryNet]

Did you check in the BIOS to make sure the adapters are still there and are enabled?

What is listed under Network Adapters in Device Manager? What errors or warnings, if any, in Device Manager?