Dear all,

I have recently installed Windows 7 on a Thinkpad R50e, and I have wireless issues. I can't find appropriate drivers for the wireless card, which appears as "Network controller" with a fault (yellow exclamation mark icon). The ones on the Lenovo website do not seem to work... The card is activated in the BIOS, and Fn+F5 does not do anything noticeable. Internet works via Ethernet. By doing different searches, I gathered that Thinkpads R50e were shipped with different wireless cards, but is there a way to find out which one, and how to get Win7-compatible drivers for it?

Thanks a lot for any help or advice

Hello gmer, welcome to the forum.

A few ways I can think of to make sure which card you have are:
1) Remove the keyboard and palm rest to physically look at the device.
2) Boot a live Linux CD (I like Puppy for this) and see what wireless chipset it reports.
3) Serial number parts look up at Lenovo support web site. If it's still available.

On the other hand, since there are no Win7 drivers for the R50e, there are only two Lenovo drivers that might work on your machine...the Vista drivers for either the Intel card or the IBM (Atheros) card. Windows update is also usually pretty good at finding drivers for legacy hardware (if any exist).

In Device Manager:
Double click on "Network Controller", go to "Details" tab, select "Hardware Ids" from the dropdown menu, and post the first line.
It will look somewhat like this:



You can also try searching for the 4-digit codes after "VEN_" and "DEV_" online. Usually it will tell you what the card is.

When looking up "Ven_" and "Dev_"

This may help you narrow down some things PCI Vendor and Device Lists