I have the exact same problems and I have spent two weeks reading everything in this thread and many other similar ones that cover a period of more than a year now that users have been posting about this issue.
All of the obvious fixes do not work for me. Things that do NOT work are:
- Install HP Wireless Button. It just does something with airplane mode, but the light stays orange. The WiFi "switch" is greyed out on the screen and not active.
- Re-setting the BIOS to defaluts. Updating the BIOS to the latest version. None of that works.
- Reinstalling or updating wireless drives for Intel Centrion N2230 wireless driver.
- Fiddling around in network properties to un-tick a power management box.
- Using the normal trouble shooting applications. Everything just comes back to say "wireless is turned off" but nothing can help me turn it on.
- Going into Device Manager and disenabling certain drivers, uninstalling them, reinstalling them, updating them and a whole lot more. I still got nothing.
- My machine Pavilion dv7-7120ei is still under guarantee. I logged a support ticket with HP. Not even the courtesy of a reply.
- When I bought the machine there was a lot of point of sale promotion that offered special deals to upgrade to Win 8.
- Now that I upgrade to Win 8 it does not work.
- In some forums I see that it may be possible to roll back to Win 7, but that it is difficult and risky.
- I have just bought a Belkin USB wireless dongle and that at least enables me to identify and connect wirelessly. But that is just a poor fix for a problem that might great minds of HP and Microsoft should be able to repair.
It seems amazing to me that HP and Microsoft between them are happy to sell this stuff but appear totally unable and unwilling to provide fixes that work. Where I live, this machine costs a lot in local currency. It is possible to just throw the thing in the trash after less than 8 months and buy another brand. I will not be bankrupt, but I feel robbed and exploited by this system.