NIC probs after reassembling laptop

Every idea is appreciated.

The battery is completely dead and prompting to replace it at every start, so I removed it and am using only A/C.

What tells the NIC to start with the PC? There is no setting in BIOS I can see. Would it be in a started state if there is no OS on the HD, wired directly from the PSU via its switch?

What I'm getting at is whether there is a setting or service between the LAN hardware starting - perhaps from BIOS setting or on its own directly from PSU via LAN switch - and the OS telling it to always connect to the preferred network as it's set to do? I'm looking for that now.

I don't know? I'd have to watch my laptop boot up and see when The WIFI indicator lights up. My better half is using right now so I'll have to check it latter. I don't know if its software or hardware. Boot up into the BIOS and press the on off button. If nothing happens then its a software function. If it turns on and off I would think its a hardware function.

On my Acer laptop the WIFI indicator starts to flash as Windows loads and then becomes fully active when I log in. I'd say the on off function on mine is a software function. Likely built into the Acer supplied driver. Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure the Bluetooth indicator didn't work at all until I installed the driver for it.

Another clue: The wireless connection icon in Systray scans for network to connect to before fouling out because it sees no wireless adapter is available. This is represented by blue circle on the icon immediately at startup for 5-10 seconds before it changes to the red X.

Have you tried installing the Laptop manufacturers recommended driver?

Have used the Vista driver which worked before, and the Win7 driver for that test partition. Will try the one on the Compaq webpage for Vista.

It's a push button next to Power button in top center of laptop, slightly smaller, lit with orange light if offline and blue if online.

Hi Greg,
Glad you got it working !

Re

However I don't know exactly how tearing down the laptop and rebuilding it to paste the processor caused this to happen as it was never included in the years-old Clean Reinstall of Vista which I happened to do. Maybe it involves some toggle of the LAN chip which occurred else ways. Any ideas?

That is weird, and I'm not sure how/why this could happen

As the problem started after opening the laptop, is there any connector to the "LAN switch" you can re-seat to make sure that a bad connection after cleaning/reassembling is not the issue?

If there is a connector, maybe it got touched or the cleaning caused a "connection problem".