After formatting my old Packard Bell Easynote R8740 laptop and installing Windows Vista on it I couldn’t get my Wireless to work. Vista diagnosed the problem and suggested I “Turn on wireless capability” at which point I realised that my wireless was turned off and the shortcut/function key (Fn + F2) wasn’t working. The Fn key was working in combination with other keys, such as the volume and brightness +/-, but just didn’t do anything when I pressed the one relating to the wireless.

While searching around the Internet I found loads of forum messages telling people to use the switch on the laptop or the function key to enable their wireless, which suprsingly fixed alot of peoples problem, but I couldn’t find much relating to the problem I was having and nothing related to this laptop and the problem.

In an attempt to fix the problem I thought I would try installing the “Wireless hotkey and indicator driver” which is intended for my laptop but which also says is only compatible with Windows XP. I had a little trouble installing it but ensuring I ran the installer as Administrator fixed that. Unfortunately after I had installed it and rebooted, which I had a little icon indicating that my wireless was off, I still couldn’t turn my wireless back on.

Eventually I realised that the program, which now starts on startup, wasn’t itself running in Administrator mode… after setting its property to start in Administrator mode my Wireless now works