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kevluck373

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Insprion 1545 problems

Hello,
A lady gave me her laptop, Dell Inspiron 1545 to fix. Lady told me the laptop couldn’t connect to wireless anywhere.

The laptop has Windows 7 Home Premium x64. Booting up the laptop & looking at the properties of the wireless, the message was, “Windows couldn’t load the driver.” Luckily I just updated driver for the wireless & worked afterwards.

The part I’m stuck at now is getting more devices in the device manager working or get rid of them. Also, there are icons on the desktop but aren’t shown on the desktop even though desktop icon settings are set to show the icons; however, if you look through the user folders you can see the icons on the desktop for the user, but again just don’t show up on the desktop for some reason.

There’s 1 device that has no driver for it. I downloaded every driver from Dell to test on the unknown device but no luck. To me, every unknown device has a hardware ID, & this has helped me find drivers for unknown stuff in the past, but looking at the properties through device manager there is no hardware ID in the drop down list; there’s a screen shot of the included.

The McAfee sweet was installed on the laptop but wasn’t renewed; however, there was for more to the whole McAfee sweet than just ant-virus. There was a McAfee firewall & if my memory is correct, some type of McAfee proxy deal.

I installed the free ClamWinfree anti-virus & only 2 hoax virus infections were found; at least ant-virus said they were fake. I’ve Norton AV 2013 at home, & you can make a boot CD to scan your PC/laptop w/, which I did for this laptop & no infections were found; think this would eliminate viruses as a problem.

Looking through the device manager, the 2 network hardware parts now work after updating the drivers; NIC & Wireless. Looking at the device manager though, there’s a fair amount of network adapters that don’t have drivers. I could be wrong, but I’m not sure if all the network adapters that are listed as not working were some virtual network adapters because of McAfee or something else. Along w/ McAfee, there was also some Cisco software installed. I ran the Cisco software install again & chose remove. Every device w/ a problem says, “Windows cannot load the drivers for this required device, code 31” Maybe the devices are because of some DSL connection software but haven’t found anything like that installed yet.

I’ve updated the BIOS to the latest, & have done physical tests on the hard drive & no errors were found.

Unfortunately the lady doesn’t have any of the CDs that came w/ the laptop, & I assume this means reinstalling Windows 7 is not possible. Perhaps, the laptop is still as it came from Dell, maybe Dell has a refresh/recover deal.

There’s a lot in the experts website about this model, & one instance that’s familiar to mine but a broken function key was the problem for that one.

I’ve included some screen shots of the device manager to hopefully give an idea of what I see.

Thanks for any ideas
devmanag.jpg
unknown.jpg
Avatar of nazg82
nazg82

It cloud still be a rootkit.
Please scan de laptop with Kaspersky's TDSSKiller. http://support.kaspersky.com/5350
Avatar of kevluck373

ASKER

Hello

I choose all the scanning options w/ the TDSSkiller & didn't find anything. Attached is a screen shot showing the results.

Thanks
kapersky.jpg
I have Windows 7 Professional 64, & put my DVD in hoping the messed up network devices would be able to find a driver from the DVD, unfortunately no.

I don't know if Windows 7 Professional x64 vs. Windows 7 Home x64 would make a difference.

Doesn't seen there are drivers to download from somewhere for the WAN PPOE adapter & other adapters.
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Avatar of Shane McKeown
Shane McKeown
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Avatar of nobus
i would start by installing all drivers for this laptop :
http://www.dell.com/support/drivers/us/en/19/Product/inspiron-1545

i usually start with the chipset driver - then the rest
**you can use the service tag for correct laptop driver ID

or use this method for id'ing devices :
if you have  unknown devices in device manager, you can use this procedure to identify them :

1-visit the motherboard manufacturers support site, for downloading drivers
2- use windows update >optional updates to find them

3-Start>Programs>Accessories>System Tools>System Information.
Now select  "Components" and highlight "Problem Devices".
All hardware devices with a driver problem will be listed here.
Make a note of the first line of the PNP Device ID line of the entry. It will show a Vendor number and a Device number (VENxxxxDEVxxxx) both four digits long.
Look up those numbers here:   http://www.pcidatabase.com/index.php

This will tell you the manufacturer and the chip number.  
Check the manufacturer's website first or google them - or post them here

If your LAN is running, you can also use windows update> optional drivers, or  use slimdrivers : https://www.slimwareutilities.com/slimdrivers.php
Hello,

It was a lot easier than I though it'd be using the Dell recovery partition for the factory reset option.

It'd backed my files & so on for me, & pretty much reinstalled Windows. Afterwards all the devices in device manger were there w/o any problems.

More than likely I wouldn't have thought about the F8 option

Thanks to everyone
using this option it was very easy getting the laptop back going