Hi. I've recently purchased a wireless network card for my PC running Windows Server 2008 R2. It is a TP-Link WN851N. Under Ubuntu Linux, this card works out of the box. Under Windows XP, it runs after installing the driver. On Windows Server 2008 R2, it doesn't. There are no Win7 drivers, so I took the manufacturer's advice and installed the Vista x64 driver. Which didn't help. Any way to get it working?

First of all, have you enabled Wireless Networking? What exactly doesn't work? Have you tried to install the driver manually via the Device Manager as explained here?

Good luck!

Yes and yes. It doesn't work, by not finding any networks to join.

Might sound stupid, but check if the powerswitch (if any) is enabled. Look if you can find any networks using the NetStumbler application. Preconfigure your wireless network in the Network and Sharing Center -> Manage wireless networks and see if you see any traffic in the Wireshark packet analyzer (also try promiscuous mode).

If all of that doesn't result in anything it looks like the driver isn't compatible... One thing you can try if that's the case is, to connect your PC to the Internet using a Ethernet cable and run Windows Update. Another possibility is to install Windows 7 and if it works using the included drivers or Windows Update drivers, extract these using for example Driver Genius and use them in Windows Server 2008 R2.

Hope this pushes you into the right direction!

I have an EnGenius EUB9706 wireless-n USB network adapter that is automatically detected and installed by Windows Server 2008 R2 but refused to install when I had server 2008. I was able to work around this by running the software installation in compatibility mode for Windows XP. A simple solution but it might work for you as well. Try downloading the Windows XP driver version for your network adapter and running it in compatibility mode for XP.