"(And you Mac folks, please don't just tell me to buy a Mac, thanks anyway, but I'll work with the equipment I already have)"
LOL
So sad that you have to tell them that.
Eureka!!
Bingo!!
FReepers are Awesome!! I got the driver from Dell.com on one of my working machines, put it on a flash drive, and loaded it on the "lonely" machine. I then went into the Device Manager, and Voila, Network Adapter had appeared, and the correct network adapter was under it, so then I 'updated the driver', and I have Internet!
The odd thing is that I knew what the name of the Network Adapter is, so last night I loaded the supposed driver for it off of the driver disc that came with the machine, but it didn't work. But once I went to Dell.com and put in the Serial#/Service Tag# of the machine, it turns out it gave me the correct driver. Weird that they didn't give me the correct driver on the disc that came with the machine.
Now when my wife wakes up (she pulled a 12 hr shift at the hospital last night), she will be pleased to be able to go on the Internet on her own machine!
Thanks again to the incomparable FReeper Geek Squad!!