ok so I tried to reinstall windows 7 on my toshiba satilite r845- S85 but when i finnished all the drivers having anything to do with the internet were gone. i tried downloading them from the toshiba web site but it still did not work. even when pluged into the modem. then i downloaded ubuntu 8.04. i am new to ubuntu so i am not to good at navigating through it but it seems to be the same problem i had with windows because it cannot find any wifi networks and there are at least 7 that are in range. also plugging it directly i still doesnt work. i need to get my pc up and running asap.

Ubuntu 8.04 is 5 years old and went EOL a year ago, why install such an old version?

Anyway, is the problem that the computer doesn't recognize the wifi card, or that the wifi card doesn't see any networks? Those are two very different issues. And what is this about plugging it into the modem, are you talking about wired ethernet now? Often times you need to reboot the modem when you change the mac address of the device connected to it (router vs PC).

im pretty sure that the wifi and ethernet card drivers are not installed but i dont know how to get tem for linux and couldnt figure out how to install them on windows.

maybe there is a wireless switch button on your laptop? There is hardly need to install wireless drivers on linux as there are distributions that come with wireless drivers pre-installed.

4 ways to get wifi working on linux

No there is not a switch on the computer. I think when I reinstalled windows it was a different version of windows than the one that came with the computer so it did some thing to the drivers. When I had windows and looked in the device manager the USB controller, Ethernet controller, network controller, pci simple communications controller, and the base system device were all not installed.