One of my customers gave me a Dell Latitude E5510 – the battery was shot (the laptop wouldn’t work unless you plugged it in), and it had no hard drive.
I ended up putting a Sandisk 480MB SSD (around $50 from Office Depot), and I bought a new Dell OEM battery for around $50. The machine came with Windows 7, but I ended up putting Windows 10 on it. Windows 10 worked without a hitch, so I stayed with it.
Lo and behold, my wife’s laptop died (I literally could not get it to come on, no matter what I did), so the Dell Latitude was right on time – I was able to give it to my wife, so that we didn’t have to buy her a new laptop.
It’s been working fine for her, until wifi quit working on it. I took the tiny wifi adapter out of her previous laptop, but it wouldn’t work in the Latitude – the Latitude’s wifi card has only wifi, but the other wifi card has wifi and bluetooth, and I believe that’s why it won’t work in the Latitude.
I pulled the USB wifi adapter off of our TV and installed it on her laptop, and she was back in business. But I wanted to fix her laptop, so I found the exact same part on Ebay for around $5! (I did a search on the part number.)
The part arrived today, and I installed it in her laptop. She is now online without the external USB adapter!
A few points:
* How did I know that the other wifi adapter was for bluetooth and wifi? Because it had two MAC addresses on the adapter. If it was for wifi only, it would have had only one MAC address on the adapter.
* How did I know that her wifi adapter was bad? Because using another wifi adapter fixed the problem.
* You can usually get replacement parts cheap on Ebay. And if by chance you get a part that doesn’t work, you didn’t lose much, because you got it cheap.
with Windows 10 running in a remote session on my file server
