Acer 5515 Vista 32bit Basic

My teenager has had this laptop for almost two years and to make an incredibly long story short we had to restore the hard drive to factory settings causing the wireless card to basically disappear. There is an error saying Windows did not detect any wireless network hardware, now I don't understand why, the wireless card is built in so it was never removed... It appears to be gone under device manager and I already spoke with Acer who informed me that I was no longer under warranty and I should reinstall the driver which I did with no luck. While i install the driver it tells me that there is no hardware associated with the software I'm installing, I have done hours of research online and I have gotten nowhere. I'm at a loss and am hoping you can offer some help.

 

Hi,

there are several possible reasons for that issue:

• the device has been disabled by the hardware switch
• the card has lost contact to the slot where it is installed and needs to be reseated
• the card has died

Michael

 

You say you did factory restore ? How ? Usings discs you burned yourself or via ERecovery.
I would try a restore again using the hidden partiton (ERecovery)

Acer Support - Frequently Asked Questions list for How to use Acer eRecovery

Any password is usually just zeros unless you set these up at the start.

Also try opening control panel (classic view) and "Add hardware" to see if Windows finds anything.