No Wifi with Iconia W500 and Windows 10

Hi,

I have upgraded my Acer Iconia W500 from the clean factory Windows 7 to Windows 10. I've made sure I have ALL the updates from Microsoft. Everything works great EXCEPT I cannot get Wifi to turn on. The button to turn on Wi-Fi is greyed out. Airplane mode is NOT turned on. If I go to Network Settings, the slider for Wi-Fi is Off and when I switch it to On it just moves right back of the Off position. I have upgraded the Wifi driver to the lastest driver I could find which is Qualcomm Athereros Communications 3.0.2.181 with a driver date of 3/12/2015. I've tried uninstalling the driver and device many times and letting Windows find the adapter again. Every time it recognizes the device fine and installs the driver. I've even looked in the bios to see if the Wifi adapter was disabled there but there isn't even a Wifi option in there. I've tried unchecking the "Allow the comptuer to turn off this device to save power" option in the adapter properties but that does not help. I don't see any errors in the event viewer (or anywhere for that matter). I can use the LAN adapter fine but it doesn't make it very portable if I cannot use the Wifi. Does anyone have any ideas?

Thanks for your help!!!

Accepted answers

becca-williams

Hey there! I recently had this same difficulty on my Acer One 10 series. I was frustrated with it for about two weeks! What needed to happen is that the driver used to connect to any wireless networks did not automatically update to a version compatible with Windows 10. In order to download the correct version, the only answers I could find were to go onto the manufacturers website and download a driver from there. The problem is that you can't really do that as easily without wifi.

What I suggest is use a different computer to go onto the Acer Website. Click the "store" tab. Then choose your country. On the next page, scroll down to the bottom, under "support" there is a link that reads "driver downloads."

From here, enter or search for your model. Once you've selected your model, below there will be a list of driver downloads you might need. The one you want is "Wireless LAN"

From the different computer, download this to a flash drive, then download it from the flash drive to the device with the issues. Make sure it's in an actual folder so it doesn't go away when you take out the flash drive (obviously).

Once downloaded, go to the start menu, and select settings. click update and security, then recovery. click restart now under "advanced startup." it's gonna do something that looks like restarting, don't touch anything until it gives you the option to select "troubleshoot."

once you've selected troubleshoot, select "advanced options", select "startup settings" then "restart" it will then take you to a list of options, select the option to disable driver signature reinforcement.

Once you've selected that, your device should restart. once it does, the new updated driver should be in tact and you should be able to access the internet.

It took me like two weeks to figure this all out, but the process i've written out for you probably takes less than an hour and it actually worked.

I know it's a lot of instructions but it worked for me, and i hope it works for you!! good luck!

All comments

billsey

Do you have any VPN clients installed?

IMB

Hi, No I don't have any VP clients installed. Actually I haven't installed anything since I've upgraded. I've been trying to get the wifi working on it instead of using it. Smiley Happy

Also, I went from a fresh Win 7 without anything additional installed to Windows 10. I'm stumped.

billsey

You may have already tried this, but in the properties for the WiFi Adapter there is a power savings tab. Try telling it to not turn the adapter off to save power. Also, in Power Options; change plan; advanced; wifi there is a different setting for power that might override the one in properties.

IMB

Thanks. I just changed the setting in the power manangement to Maximum Performance for both on battery and plugged in. I also made sure that the power setting to turn off the wifi in the adapter properties was off as well. It didn't seem to change anything. I still can't turn wifi on. I would think that I would see an error in the event viewer or something when I try to turn wifi on but it's not showing an error anywhere.

IMB

Also, I was wondering if you thought it might be something with the keyboard shortcut to turn on wifi? The keyboard shows "Fn" + "F3" to turn on wifi, but when I try, it does nothing.