How do you enable WiFi with Aspire 4520?

Hi All,

I have an Acer Aspire 4520 that I recently upgraded to Win 7 from Vista. I don't use the WiFi that much anymore but now the button at the top of the keyboard when pressed says,"Wireless LAN disabled" in green lettering at the bottom of the screen. I have downloaded all the available Win 7 drivers for my model from the Acer website. I have found nothing in Control Panel that enables/disables wireless networking. I have checked the BIOS and there is nothing that even mentions a wireless adapter. Under Device Manager under Network Adapters, there are no network adapters listed except for NVIDIA nForce Networking Controller. I don't know if that is for WiFi but it reportedly is fine with the latest driver. The integrated wireless in my laptop used to work fine. Now it is "disabled". How do I re-enable it? Please help! Thank you very much.

 

Acer didn't include Wi-Fi drivers on their support site for your model.
You have either Atheros or Broacom based Wi-Fi card.
You can try to install drivers for Broacom from here and for Atheros from here.
Still there should be an unknown device showing in device manager...

 

Thank you moderator. You know what? I finally got it to work by putting in the battery. After wracking my brains as to why it would work before and why not now, the only thing I could think of was that I was keeping the battery in the fridge and using AC power and maybe the battery was required for WiFi. It didn't make any sense to me but I just stuck it in a few moments ago and by god, everything is working! In device manager, it now shows two pieces of hardware (Atheros AR5007EG wireless network adapter and Microsoft Virtual Miniport WiFi Adapter) that were missing before. I have spent hour upon hour surfing the internet for a solution to this problem and no guru or expert ever mentioned that putting the battery back in is the solution. I'm not blaming you or anyone else of course. I'm just gobsmacked that this isn't well publicized. It was just a lucky guess.

 

Glad you've made it. You should update your drivers regardless both for stability and especially security reasons.
I admit I haven't seen something like this. It's not that uncommon for people to use notebooks without the battery and Wi-Fi works.
I guess it's model-specific and I doubt it was done on purpose as it makes no sense at all.

 

Mr. moderator,
I went to the Atheros driver link you gave but which driver is for my system? The very latest iteration for Windows 7? By the way, I did download that one and extracted it but how do I run it? There is no .exe file just a bunch of files with odd suffixes. Thank you.

 

The most recent version is 9.1.0.100.
After you've downloaded & unpacked it go to device manager, double-click your Wi-Fi card, choose driver tab and click update driver and browse my computer... etc. On the next screen navigate to the now-unpacked folder with the drivers & confirm.
Sorry I forgot it doesn't have an installer.
It's fully functioning nonetheless- I use the very same driver downloaded from the same place so I can confirm it works flawlessly.

 

I did it. Thank you very much Moderator.

 

Hi cloudboy,
I had exactly the same problem like you with the same type of Acer laptop. How did you make it work? I mean, i've been trying to do my laptop the same like you posted but to no avail. Can you tell me exactly how you do it? In detail maybe.. b'cos it's just don't work on mine... maybe you can tell me step by step of how to enable my wireless.. and is there any different if you change your SATA Mode to AHCI Mode in Bios? hope to hear from you soon.. tq very much...