even I'm stumped... someone PLEASE help

Imagine waking up one day and none of your network adapters are functioning... ethernet, wireless, bluetooth, 1394... none work...

So you check your device manager, and everything is listed as "Unknown" ... not "Unknown Device" with the little yellow question mark, but "Unknown" like the symbol for non plug-and-play devices...

you try to reinstall your hardware, but to no avail... uninstall, reboot, reinstall, no luck... install chipset drivers... no luck... you even resort to windows system restore... no luck... what do you do?



here's the deal... I'm a computer tech, and a very good friend of mine brought me her laptop this afternoon after her babysitter freed himself on it for a night or two... none of her network adapters were working when she got it back... I looked at it, and the above scenario is what I've found... included is a picture with the symptoms I'm describing... please help, she can't afford to reinstall windows (she's missing program disks)... thanks

i thought the same thing, too... when all the networking things were gone i thought "wtf?"

she has AVG but that program isn't worth the time it takes to download it, imho...

i'll check for viruses tonight... any other ideas?

i had already tried that...

i had to do a destructive system restore (tablet XP) i hated doing that, but she was really time crunched... saved her data, destructive system restore, move data back, resetup programs and import settings... good as new