Acer Aspire 5003WLMi WIFI not working

I recently got my laptop back from Acer because the keyboard had to be replaced. Well, they went ahead and formatted my hard drive while they were at it, and installed XP Home Edition.

So once I got it back I formatted again, and installed XP Pro with SP2. Anyways, to get to the point, I installed all the drivers using that disc that comes with the laptop that has all the drivers on it.

Everything went smooth, until I tried my wifi. The orange light seems to blink, but when I click on the small computer icon on the taskbar, and click on "Refresh Network List" it starts searching, and doesnt display any networks.

I tried to uninstall the driver and reinstall it again, but I get the same problem. I even went to a library where they had a ton of wifi connections, and it never displays them.

I also went as far as uninstalling my Firewall to see if that was causing the problem, but it still doesnt work.

I almost know for a fact that my wifi card is working, because it worked when I got the laptop back from Acer, but as soon as I formatted, it stopped displaying networks.

Can anybody please suggest to me what to do, cause this is really starting to bug the hell out of me.

 

I had a similar problem with a client's laptop a couple of years back. Their are two solutions that I can think of:
1) Go to the Acer website and download the latest drivers for the wireless card. Believe it or not, these are not always the same as on the recovery/driver CD. I formatted my new Acer 9424 and had to do the same for my touchpad.
2) Go to the manufacturers website for the wireless card. This was the option I used for the clients PC. Even the driver that Acer sent me directly didn't work. Some of the drivers they use only work with an "official Acer installation". Let me know how you get on. Cheers.

 

ok, i tried both of the methods that you suggested.

I went to Acers website, and found the driver for my wifi card, but its the exact same one that I have on the cd, the version number and everythnig is exactly the same, so i didnt bother downloading it, cause im on dial up, and its like 7 mb, lol

and as for method 2, i went to BroadCom's website, and located the drivers section for the wireless NIC cards, but I have no idea which chipset I have, and broadcom only lists the drivers by chipset number. And I cant seem to find the chipset number anywhere....

so do you happen to have any other suggetions?

 

OK. This is a bit long-winded but it's worth a shot....
Back up all of your personal files first of all.
Then do an Acer System Restore (via their CDs) which will obviously restore your system to all the usual factory gumff they put on it as well.
Check to make sure that the wireless works, as it could be that it is faulty.
Download a little free program called "Driver Magician" from:
http://www.drivermagician.com/DriverMagician.exe
When you run the program (no need to register it as you will only use it once hopefully) click the driver for your wireless card and then choose a place the saved files to.
Copy those files to a CD or some other safe location, then reinstall Windows how you want it, and when asked for the wireless driver (point it to where you saved the driver files).
Let me know how you get on.

 

got the exact same problem.

@stoffershorty, if he uses the system restore cd's he'll get xp home and fat32 instead of NTFS and a bunch of other crap.

i did the same thing, formatted the xp home partition, installed xp professional, downloaded drivers for my laptop for the wifi card, and it doesn't work too...

 

Have you tried installing the Broadcom wireless connection utility and using that instead of the built-in XP one?