I recently got a Dell 1012 netbook from dell's website. It showed up yesterday. I decided to I wanted to put XP on it instead of Windows 7 starter.

Windows 7 starter rips out the personalization from the desktop. You can't easily change your wallpaper, etc. I also figured XP would run faster on this 1gb RAM 1.66ghz system.

First I installed XP from a flash drive using a guide I found online at http://www.vandomburg.net/installing-windows-xp-from-usb/. It was fairly simple if you know what you're doing.

Second I copied all the drivers from the DVD that came with the netbook to my flash drive to install drivers.

Of course the first driver I try to install is the wireless network card. On the DVD it only had a "Wireless WLAN 1397 Half-Minicard (4312bg)." I thought this was weird since I know the PC I ordered had 802.11N wireless.

This driver DID NOT WORK. It basically said it wasn't found on the computer.

Since I had already formatted and installed XP, I could no longer boot to the Windows 7 to look and see what it says the device is in the device manager.

After a lot of googling and such I figured out it was an Atheros chip in the card. I later found something pointing that it might be a AR9285.

After googling the HID and PID's from the Hardware Device Instance I finally found a driver that works.

http://wikidrivers.com/wiki/Atheros_AR5xxx/AR9xxx_win5x

I downloaded the rather small file to my USB drive, stuck it in and ran. It was basically a self extracting file. I told it to extract to my C: and noted where it was.

I then went into Device Manager, clicked on the device and did an update driver. I told it to search the location of where I extracted the file. I didn't find a driver for my device.

I then tried displaying a list of drivers and letting me choose. I did a Have Disk, pointed to the x86 dir of the driver I extracted and then selected "Atheros AR9285" and BOOM, it worked!!

I hope this helps anyone else who runs into this until Dell updates it's website to include the driver. If you are reinstalling Windows 7 you can find a link to the driver for it on the wikidriver page.