The laptop has a button somewhere to turn the adapter on or off. It may be off. If so all you have to do is find the right button and push it.

yes and it is often very easy to turn it off by mistake. on my netbook it is a little slider button at the very front edge right where I often grab it and in doing so slide it to off. Look for the little symbol that looks like a satelite dish sort of.
Also depending on how old it is it may not have a wireless connection card in it which you can take care of easily.
Tell us the model of the laptop.

Have you hooked it up to your connection using a wire to make sure you can connect that way and it is not some other problem? If not do that right away.
and give us more info on the type of connections you have and the specs on the laptop including the OS.

There is a slider bar on the front of the laptop. I switched it both ways and still cannot connect. I don't have wireless capabilities yet so I'm using a hard wire for road runner. The road runner is fine because it's working on my desktop so I can post.

It's using Windows Vista
Intel(R) Core 2 Duo CPU T7500 @ 2.20GHz
RAM is 2046
System type 32-bit Operating System
I thought the model was Inspiron 1420?

Thanks :)

Have you checked the device manager for problems. I've never used vista but probably right click on 'my computer' and click on properties in the drop down menu. Look for network adapters and see if you have any red or yellow exclamation marks in front. Maybe right click on the adapter and click properties on the context menu and look for problems there.

Or you should have 2 small computers down by the clock in the task bar. Do they they show a red x, indicating a cable issue? You may also right click these computer icons and choose repair it never works but it may give you an indication of what is wrong.

Boot the computer to Safe Mode w / Networking and see if it connects to www.Google .com.

Well I had a chance to go through all the suggestions but was unsuccessful. I wasn't able to connect in the Safe Mode and the repair function on the computer icon didn't fix it. I found the device manager and adapters but didn't see any information there either. The only options are for wireless and broadband connections. I give up! But thanks for all of your help!

ok what can you do with the laptop? does it boot up? what are you using for internet provider? you mention road runner as in cable? If so that is a broadband connection.
What kind of router are you using? you should have a cable modem that they provided you then some type of router that you have an Ethernet cable coming from it to your laptop. or do you have the ethernet cable going directly from the cable modem box to your laptop?

you said you were not able to connect in safe mode what happened why not?

Is this a brand new laptop you just bought from Dell?

I thought I was supposed to connect to the broadband and when I did it asked for user name & password. I called Time Warner for it and was told I needed to connect to the LAN.

Well anyways....I'm posting from my laptop - woohoo. I just went and bought a wireless router and it's running smoothly now!

well at least you got it working! just make sure you did set up your wireless router securely.