Dell Inspiron 600m Wireless Connectivity Problem

[Meatwad]

I have a Dell Inspiron 600m laptop. I tried all day to connect to my wireless router. I tried different configurations on the router and in puppy 3.01 network connection wizard and nothing worked.

My roomate kicked me out of the room with the internet cable so I could only connect wirelessly, so I reinstalled windows to get back online. The Windows installation deleted my puppy HD saved files.

I connected just fine under windows (after 2 hours of reinstalling drivers--thanks Dell, Microsoft). Then I looked through the forums and thought I had found a fix, so I reloaded puppy and tried to get online. This time it worked under the internet configuration wizard. Crazy Crazy. I think somebody else may have had a similar problem/solution. When I put the Dell Drivers CD in the drive to load the drivers, this is what it tells me about my network devices.

Network Devices:

x Broadcom 570x Gigabit Integrated controller Rev: A?
Dell True Mobile 1180 Internal 802.11b Mini-PCI Card Rev: A02
Dell True Mobile 1300 Internal 802.11b/g MPCI Rev: A06
Dell True Mobile 1400 Internal Dual-band WLAN Card REv: A03
Dell True Mobile 300 Bluetooth Internal Card Rev: A00
x Intel (r) Pro/Wireless 2100 LAN miniPCI Adapter Rev:?

I don't know if these are drivers or pieces of hardware (I don't know much about computers and am particularly ignorant about networking, sorry). It put the "xs" next to the 2 devices with xs. I think that means I have to install those drivers, but I'm not sure. The CD contains drivers only (and some patch and diagnostic stuff) and it's not part of the windows CD.

Anyway, if you have a 600m and you can't get online, you might want to try getting online with windows to make sure that your network is set up right, then reinstall puppy (or pick the boot option where it ignores previous save files), start the network connection wizard, and make sure you put in the right information the first time. Others had reported that the Wizard might be reverting to the "automatic" profile when it tries to connect to the internet, no matter what profile you choose, so that might have something to do with it (i.e. you had an old WEP key in your wizard for the "automatic" profile, you change that profile or add a new profile for your new router, but the card is still connecting using the old "automatic" profile settings). That's an un-educated guess.