Windows 7 - NETGEAR Networking Card

A friend of mine has kind of an old laptop. It has NIS 2010 on it. When you start it up, it takes Norton a while to startup leaving it somewhat vulnerable to viruses during startup. Recently, on one occasion, her laptop got hit with a rogue AV but when Norton started up it found it and quarantined it. However, I am thinking that this rogue did some damage before Norton started up because her computer uses a NETGEAR networking card. It doesn't work not. It's as though the driver for it got wiped out or something. There was more than one virus that was caught by Norton.

My question is, if I wipe her system and reinstall her XP laptop, will be make her NETGEAR networking card work again? The system is already slow enough so I was thinking a clean install might help that as well.

Well I would first check and make sure you have drivers for her card otherwise you may have an issue. If you have a restore disk with the laptop it should restore it back to the same as when she first purchased it

It is a Dell laptop and there is a program on there to restore it back to defaults or something like that.

Then that should take the laptop back to the point as it was when purchased