So my daughter and I get my wife an Eee PC for my wife’s birthday a few month’s back, and the little laptop has been working fairly well ever since. The space bar doesn’t work all that well, and typing got a good bit easier when I picked up a $10 keyboard off of NewEgg, but otherwise, the little 9-incher has worked well for your basic web browsing, email-checking, etc. (technically, it’s an 8.9 in. screen, but who’s counting).

The small laptop worked great up until I decided to run the included Asus Update program to install a newer version of the computer’s BIOS (version 0704). After that, the wireless internet just stopped working. The operating system couldn’t even find the wireless network adapter - as if the wireless hardware had never existed. I search through the Windows Device Manager looking for it, and to see if there were any errors, but as far as Windows was concerned, the built-in WiFi wasn’t there.

Finally, I booted into the BIOS (that was what had changed, after all) by rebooting the computer and immediately pressing the F2 key when the computer first began to start up. That took me to the blue BIOS screen, at which point I found that the WiFi - as well as the web cam - had been disabled. Since that was at a more base level than even the operating system, this explained why Windows didn’t think the wireless card was there. So I enabled the wireless (and the web cam), restarted the computer, and all is well now.

I wanted to share the experience, though, in case any other Eee PC owners run into the same sort of problem. I had scoured the forums and Google in search of a solution, but didn’t find anything that sounded like what we were experiencing. Hopefully that means the little laptops are working just perfectly for everyone else out there.