Today I clean installed Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit and it worked perfectly until I noticed that I can't connect to the wifi anymore. Right now I have my phone tethered to my laptop (and my phone is connected to my wifi) but it's not very stable nor is it fast enough to finish setting up my laptop.
Before I reinstalled windows, the internet icon on the toolbar was a few bars and now it gives me the monitor/cable icon. There isn't a list for the wifi networks when I click on it. If I go in to network and sharing center and click the red X to open the map it says the adapter isn't connected. In device manager none of the network adapter drivers are in need of updating, however under "Other Devices", "Network Controller" has the exclamation mark. I searched as long as I could for the driver but the two I downloaded didn't work.
My laptop is an Alienware M17X R4.
My OS is Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit.
The Network Controller physical device object name is "\Device\NTPNP_PCI0015"
Any help would be much appreciate and I'd like to solve this problem some time in the near future.