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Been trying to fix this POS hp laptop for too long now! I reinstalled Win7 because someone had updated it to W10 and it had way too many issues with processes utilizing the cpu constantly. Hardly any of the HP drivers were detected and I had to manually install them one by one. No network drivers, no sd-card drivers, and no freaking USB drivers! Thank god it had a cd-rom and I was able to burn the ethernet driver from another pc at least.

After hours I finally got everything installed except the wifi. It still shows "network controller" under other devices and I've tried every network driver from HP for this laptop, Pavilion dm4-3055dx

I searched google using the device's hardware ID which lead me to multiple possibilities. A realtek driver (which the ethernet is realtek so it seemed most likely), then a broadcom driver, and an atheros (which won't even install). According to HP, it's an intel centrino wireless-n 6150 but that doesn't seem to work either. The laptop originally came with win7 so it's not like a driver doesn't exist out there, I just can't figure out which one.

I have had similar issues in past sorting out laptops here and there for folks...one of which I couldn't get WiFi to work...I ended up thinking I will just have to tell them they're stuck with ethernet only. I had also tried every driver under the sun I could find. So I decided to tell them this, all that was left to do was to let windows update do it's thing before I handed the thing back, turns out that windows update sorted it out. It's no guarantee though as I tried the same thing on another machine, in this case I did windows update first, it did not work, in the end I had to remove the updates and then installed the driver which worked, I did windows update afterwards and it did not interfere. Best of luck

Edit: oops forgot to mention that I had to uninstall drivers that didn't work via device manager including after removing updates, using the uninstall package that came with drivers didn't always work - even though it uninstalled the drivers it would often still show a microsoft driver was installed when looking in device manager afterwards.

Windows update is always the first thing I try, but in this case I had no luck. I found on HP's support forum someone who asked a similar question. Same laptop, same hardware IDs for the wifi. The tech provided a link to a driver but that one didn't work for me.

I found this in a hp forum for win7, maybe it helps

Realtek RTL8188EE 802.11b/g/n Wireless LAN Driver


https://h30467.www3.hp.com/t5/Internet-red-y-conexi%C3%B3n-inal%C3%A1mbrica-para-notebooks/Driver-para-red-wifi-windows7/td-p/504652

Edited: Removed exe link because it's into the url.

Yup, tried that one. I told my friend to just buy a new laptop, for other reasons. Hardware-wise this would still be ok, but it's been dropped, battery no longer works at all, and the fan has failed so it occasionally shuts down for thermal reasons. When I opened it up, the copper heat pipe from the cpu to the fan is actually burnt! I've never seen a burnt heatsink before.

Also turns out she doesn't even have internet at home, just tethers to her phone so ethernet is out of question. New laptop or buy a $20 usb adapter.