Eight Hours. That is the amount of time I spent attempting to set up wireless on my laptop.

Why? Oh, I'll tell you why. Actually, read this.

The kernel breaks the module. 2.6.24 BREAKS bcm43xx wireless stuff. Do not upgrade to this kernel, if you are reading this.

I installed arch's 2.6.22 kernel, did a simple ifconfig eth1 up, hit the fn + f2 button, iwlist eth1 scanning. Boom. Done. Done done done. Done.

There are TONS of guides to extracting (cutting) the firmware out of the windows driver. Here's the Archwiki one.

What was I doing for eight hours? Uninstalling/Reinstalling ndiswrapper SO many times. Extracting firmware, Blah blah blah blah. What COULD I have done (in probably 10 minutes tops)?
1.) Installed the old Arch kernel from an ftp server (read up here)
2.) Installed bcm43xx-fwcutter
3.) Downloaded the Dell Drivers here
4.) Unzip
5.) Cut the firmware from bcmwl5.inf (or was it .sys?)
6.) moved the firmware to /lib/firmware
7.) rmmod/modprobe bcm43xx
8.) ifconfig eth1 up
9.) FN(function)+F2
10.) iwlist scanning