my laptop stops detecting wireless hardware after working for a while??

I've had the same problem. About a month ago, my laptop just quit picking up the wireless network. We suspected the wireless card had just quit working. My husband had a wireless adapter to plug into a computer in his computer work room in the basement. He brought it up here and plugged it into my laptop and it worked promptly. I've used that until just before Christmas when my son came down. He sat down and quickly found that I didn't have a profile anymore for it to hook into the wireless network. When he finished working on my laptop, (just a few minutes), it just logged on to the Internet with no problems and has been working ever since. Why it stopped working, we have no idea. Nobody had messed with my laptop. Just one day, it decided to quit working and it had worked for nearly 6 years on this laptop. Don't ask me what he did to make the profile. He's a computer programmer and he works on computers all the time - has for over 20 years. He told me and my husband, but it's Greek to me and I quickly forgot what he said!

Do you have a "Fn" key and a "F10" key on your keyboard? If so, try holding down Fn, then press F10 and see if that helps.