Laptop can't see 5GHz wifi connection

Viking

Hello All,

 

I need some help. Googling has not been able to let me solve this alone, so I am coming here to find an expert.

 

My laptop cannot now connect to wifi. It used to be able to and everything was fine, then the internet company updated the wifi we receive to a 5GHz connection and the laptop cannot even detect it. It can see the modem/router and it can let me type in the password but it can't connect now, I think it is because it is only the old connection it sees and this may now be deactivated by the internet company, but I am not sure.

 

A bit of Googling tells me that it may be something to do with a G or N connection (think this is an N one) and I went to the Acer website, found another WLAN driver, uninstalled the old Broadcom one, installed the new Atheros one and it still won't connect.

 

Does anyone have a fix to this? If my laptop, which is not even a year old, cannot connect to any wifi, it's basically useless as I can't use an ethernet cable when I go on holiday.

 

I do not know how to find out, exactly, what wifi adapter is in the laptop. The laptop is an Acer Aspire ES1-512-C6XH running Windows 8.1.

 

Like I say, I only got this laptop around Christmas 2014 and up until last week, everything was fine.

 

Any help would be very much appreciated. Thank you.

techy

from what info you provided I would first uninstall the atheros drivers and put the broadcom drivers back in as they are two different chips, if the original driver was broadcom then use that driver only, next, in a lot of laptops the wireless chips are designed to work on the 2.4 ghz frequency only regardless that it reads "N" connection, the 5ghz band is an "A" connection and your wirless chip is likely a "B,G,N" so it will not see the 5ghz band, if you want to use the 5ghz band you would need a different wireless connection ie an usb adapter with an "AC" connection of which would then see the 5 ghz band.

B,G,N 2.4 ghz connection is very common to be used as it will connect to pretty much any router connection without having any hassle but speed wise it is slower with a connection range of 72 mbs to 150 mbs but still very useable, an "AC" connection will connect around 400 mbs on the 5 ghz band.

Hope this helps you understand.