Windows wireless driver won't work with ubuntu or linux anyway. So the disk is of no use.   Since

Windows wireless driver won't work with ubuntu or linux anyway. So the disk is of no use.

Since this is a quite a old laptop the wireless driver might not have matched, but i'm just guessing. Run Update Manager, reboot the machine and give it a shot.

Which version of ubuntu are you using ubuntu 9.10 or ubuntu 10.04. Ubuntu 10.04 has support for ton of devices just out of the box. Unfortunately hard to answer this question due to device specific nature :)

All the best