Aspire 5050-3371 Wireless Problems

I just yesterday purchased an Aspire 5050-3371 and upon getting home immediately installed Win XP Pro over the crappy Vista included.

However... now I'm having trouble getting my Wireless Card to work. I installed the drivers I found for XP at the Acer US website, however, Device Manager lists the card with a Exclaimation mark with an Error Code 10: This device cannot start.

The light on the front of my notebook is not on at all, and the switch does indeed cause the computer to display a message of "Wireless Lan Enabled/Disabled" when flicked, but the light itself (not to mention the device) seems to do nothing at this point. I've tried everything I can think of: reinstalling the drivers, uninstalling the device, looking at the BIOS settings (couldn't find any that relate to the card), trying different drivers... etc. I'm at my wits-end here on this matter. Anyone have any idea what's wrong with this thing?

 

Did you realize that there are 2 wireless Land drivers available from acer. One is from Atheros and the other is from Broadcom, give both a try and if it still doesn't work then you will know it is possibly a hardware issue.

Also forget that acer US support site most of us on the acer forum use the acer euro site to get bios updates as well as drivers you can find it here

http://support.acer-euro.com/drivers/downloads.html

That site is updated far more often that the US acer site, also incase you were wondering any driver found on the euro site will work with any US series of the same notebook. Therefore the euro aspire 5050 drivers will work with your US spec aspire 5050

 

Yep, I did try installing those other drivers too, along with the ones on the Europe site. It does appear that the device itself is at fault, although I haven't the slightest idea what could have gone wrong with it.

(Re)installing Vista, given just how much I hate Vista (nothing but a big drain on a laptop's battery... among other resources), so I guess I'll just have to buy a wireless card for now *sighs

Of course, it does seem from what I've found searching these forums that many owners of Aspire laptops of different models seem to have trouble getting the wireless adapter to work when they install XP...

 

You don't have to go out and buy a wireless card, you said in your first post that you just yesterday purchased that notebook. Then take it back to where ever you bought it from, obviously it is under warranty therefore don't spend any money buying anything let the retailer or Acer diagnose and fix the problem for you.
Now that you have re-installed vista does the wireless work? If not take it back man... I had no wireless issues at all when I bought my 5102 last year.

 

Heh, in my annoyed-at-technology, half-asleep state I was when I made that message, I left out a part of that sentence that said that reinstalling Vista wasn't an option for me...

In any case, given that it appears that it was a hardware problem that couldn't be resolved, I took the laptop back and got a refund for it... likely I just try to find a dealer that still offers XP with the same hardware that I had on that Aspire... Dell is the only one I think of though...

Thanks for the help, though.

 

Typically, when you buy a preloaded notebook, the OEM software has either the drivers or vital links for drivers integrated into the OS. If you install a non-OEM version of an OS, you lose these links and/or drivers and you will lose functionality. (sometimes of one or more major componnent)

 

ty by the way

 

is you issue connect to wep network or wpa?

install this and make sure got latest drivers even if you not use wpa for encrypition it seem make it work better

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...4D-E7C1-48D6-95EE-1459234F4483&displaylang=en

is it try to connect network and just keep looping