Greetings, folks...

Someof you may or may not know that my Dad suffered a series of debilitating strokes about a year ago. He's been holding his own recently, but that's not the point of this post. Since he can no longer use his computer, it has come over to me. It is a Sony VAIO PCG-K33 laptop, with a 1.83GHz "Mobile Intel Pentium 4" (is that a Centrino?), and 488MB of RAM, 1MB of cache (I assume that's level 2), and a 60GB hard drive.

Note too bad, for a 2 year old computer.

I'd like to scrub it (it has XP on it, but I can't find the "recovery disk"; it's buried somewhere in Mom and Dad's house), put W2K on it, and use it at work as a roving VNC station. To do that, I have to get the wireless working.

Now the thing is supposed to come with an internal wireless, but no matter what I do I cannot get the internal wireless to operate (XP keeps telling me to turn on the radio, which I have done, to no avail). Dad also bought a Linksys wireless-G PCMCIA card, which does appear to work...or at least did previously. I'd like to use the internal wireless if possible but I can't seem to fool it into recognizing (or even seeing) my network.

Appealing to the great sentience [sic] of the LRPD, anybody outthere have any idea how to get ths thing to see a network?

(NOTE: I use WPA-PSK encryption, and have a mac filtered connection. I think I shoudl still be able to see the network, but not connect to it until I allow the new computer's MAC into the network, and give it the correct WPA-PSK key. However, I can't eve see the network, even when I have the computer next to my desktop, which sees a 70% strength connection.)

thanx in advance