arg.
my lenovo decided that my wireless card had seen one too many resource conflicts and shut it off, making me think i had somehow fried it. I learned a lot about cards and whitelists and decided to buy a dongle.
but then it told me that the card was disabled, either because of a hardware issue or a resource conflict. so i went to the device manager and sure enough, not broken, just disabled. i enabled it.
then the computer did a hardware scan without my asking and told me that there is nothing wrong with the wireless card.
edit: double arg. py's tablet's card is now working as well. i had ordered a dongle for hers. not cancelling. i think hers is working because it's jealous of mine.