Urgent Problem - calling all Acer 3100 owners.

Hi guys,

I bought a laptop from a legitimate auction yesterday with a receipt. It was an Acer Aspire 3105WLMI or also known as 3100. The laptop serial underneath was for MS Vista Home Basic OEM.

Upon firing up the lappy i noticed something weird - a Dell logo on the desktop??

One can assume the previous owner of the laptop installed the Dell OEM Vista Home Basic CD. I have no idea why.

I then noticed the wireless and ethernet controller were NOT working. Further investigation revealed the device manager had the yellow exclamation marks marked next to each.

I tried downloading the drivers from the Acer website and replacing the ones currently in use, but nothing happened. I manually uninstalled each problematic device and tried to re-installing with the new drivers from Acer website....and still nothing.

The drivers i need are native to the recovery partition and/or Acer OEM recovery disk and not on the Dell OEM disk hence the problems.

So simple answer - recover to factory settings.

Well here's the problem - there are no recovery disks and there is no Recovery partition. *Screams*

The warranty has expired.

There are a couple of websites selling the recovery disks but at silly prices.

If anyone has this model - would it be possible for you to make the recovery CD available please?

Any other advice is welcome.

Thank you guys

 

After you installed the drivers from the Acer website, were the yellow exclamation marks still there?
This might not be just a driver issue.. Is it possible that these components have been disabled in the BIOS?

 

Yes mate. They were still there.

The drivers are the issue but the culprit is the image itself.

At the moment under network adapters i have:

Realtek 800 B/G Controller, which indicates this is the wireless driver.

However, the Acer website reveals the wireless driver i need is the Broadcom Wireless driver.

So i downloaded the broadcom, installed and rebooted as required. Nothing was installed though.

So i manually uninstalled the Realtek and BUT vista automatically reinstalls it immeditately.

Same thing happens with the ethernet LAN controller driver.

I am 99.9% sure that the problem is the wrong OEM image. The one on the system is the OEM image created by Dell made specific for Dell machines.

The Acer recovery disk i need will have the original drivers fro this particular model.

 

Maybe you could try let Device Manager search for drivers online. Or try Windows Update.. it was able to find the proper drivers for the card reader in my laptop.

 

Did you tried to install drivers manually ? all i can see is you uninstalled manually.

 

Hey guys,

Thanks for your replies.

I'll try to summarise what i've done:

1. Device Manager has problems with Ethernet and Wireless drivers
2. Downloaded Acer drivers and installed
3. Rebooted when prompted and still yellow exclamation marks on reboot
4. Recovery Partition has been deleted
5. Laptop has a Dell OEM Image on it, which is not the original image.
6. Uninstalled drivers manually and allowed Vista to detect - still problems
7. The only way to get internet connectivity is via my 3G card.
8. Ran Windows updates and no updates available.

Not to sound like a pompus guy, i am Network Administrator by occupation. I have done everything i know to make this work and i am 99.9% certain that i need the recovery disks from the ACER only. No other OEM disk will work even the Microsoft Vista Home Basic OEM.

The actual Acer disk has the neccessary drivers required.

Anyone have one?

 

Are you installing drivers manually ?
Try to install drivers from device manager.

 

Done it both ways mate.

I've just realised something.

The Dell OEM version on this laptop was Vista Home Premium and the key we have on the back of the laptop is Home Basic.

Maybe if i get a Home Basic OEM CD - this will work?

 

could you check the device ids to see what wireless and ethernet adapters they are? i don't think imaging can change the ids

 

Can't see this being a problem. When you put the product key in, windows will downgrade the version to Basic, i've done it a few times without any issues.

 

Well the version on the laptop is Vista Home Premium Dell OEM.

The key underneath is Vista Home Basic OEM.

I've tried to enter the key on the bottom - and it is not being accepted.

Any ideas why?

 

About the ethernet and wireless drivers:

Make sure you UNINSTALL the old drivers first THEN install the new ones.

 

Just thought, have you tried downloading the drivers from the device manufacturers site, the reason being, i've just looked on acers website and it isn't listing all of the drivers for vista. (Unless i've missed something). Did you install XP drivers, if so, you may be having compatibility issues.

The key isn't being accepted as Home Premium is already installed. When i've used a Home Premium disc with a Basic Key, this was during installation. Sorry for the confusion!!

If it isn't accepting your product key, i think your gonna have issues.

 

Yea basically the Key isnt being accepted. However, i'm told if i have any vista retail disk, i can simply enter the key underneath the laptop and everything should work fine. Is that true?

Also you are right - Acers website does indeed have limited Vista drivers for this particular model. The only way to make up for the drivers was to download the XP ones.

But to be honest, with a Dell image on this lappy, i'd like to start from scratch - what you think?

 

As far as I am aware you should be able to use that product key without any issues if you re-install vista, when you enter the product key during installation, it will downgrade your copy of windows to vista basic.

If it's a new machine, and you've not got anything on the computer (programs etc) it may be worth doing a fresh install as it isn't accepting your product key. I personally don't know any other way round they product key issue you are having.

If you do a fresh install, it may be worth locating the drivers for the machine before you do an install, then burn them to disk. Will be easier this way. If you go to the device manufacturers websites, you should be able to find the drivers you need. If you are having issues locating them, post on here what you need and i'll try and help.