Hi,
The hd crashed on the laptop.  Out of warrenty.  so...
I replaced the failed 30 gig hard drive in the laptop with a new 60 gig one
I got from newegg.  I installed OEM xp home with the dvd that came with the
laptop.  I then installed the drivers that came with the driver dvd.
All ok in device manager except for nic card.  Went to hp web site
and downloaded updated driver, and now the yellow exclamation
point went away.

I have a router, wifi, with bellsouth service.  I use it on 2 pc's, and a
compaq laptop. the pc's connect via cat 5, one is windows ME, and
the other is XP Home.  Both work fine.  Laptop is wifi, and it works
fine, too, with XP Home.

Back to the HP pavilion, the wifi doesn't see any wifi signal.  Its as if
the wifi was turned off, but i don't see a switch on the case anywhere,
and there was nothing about it in the bios that i could find.
Plugging in the cat 5 cable also results in no connection.  The cable
is good and working because i pulled it directly from the ME pc
and plugged it into the laptop.  XP says its unplugged.
Later I checked with the owner
and found out it never has seen a wifi network, and it never
had connected via the ethernet port either.  He could only connect
via the internal 56k modem, and had given up on wifi, and cat5.

I tried the network internet wizard a few times with no success.

Any ideas on how to proceed?  Everything else seems to be
working fine, but i didn't try dialing up anything yet.  Also, there
is no software installed yet.  I thought I'd see if i can get it to connect
before installing software because that counld complicat things.
I wanted to go get XP updated on my DSL before installing software.

oh yeah, sometimes if you reboot either/or the dsl modem and the
routher pc's will pull an ip where they couldn't before.  I tried that, too
with no success.

Thanks in advance for any ideas.

Mike