Aspire V5 122p and the disappearing Wireless Card

orangebatname · August 2016

I have an Aspire V5 122P-0869 laptop with an AMD A4 card, 4 gigs of memory, 64-bit and Windows 10. It's more than a year old, used for work and personal writing and has been fairly dependable -- until this summer.

I started the computer one in June morning and the familiar Wi-Fi icon was gone, replaced with the "no network connections available" icon.

Rebooted, tried troubleshooting wizard, etc. The answer that I got was that no wireless card was installed. The Broadcom Wireless card that was there before was no longer recognized. Installing a new driver was pointless because, as far as the system was concerned, there was no card at all. I needed to install hardware first, then the drivers.

Contacted Acer help. The laptop is now out of warranty, so they were of limited assistance. The only help I got from the Tech Eduard G. was to reset the computer and reinstall Windows 10.

Which I did, and which did indeed work.

All of my files were on the cloud, so I didn't lose any data. Still, it took me a few nights to get the computer back up and running. I managed to get my apps reinstalled and my settings back the way I like them. THIS TIME, however, I created backups and set a recovery point in case of further shenanigans — which occurred three days ago.

I tried to go back to my restore point, but it still didn't recognize the card. Resetting the computer back to bare-basics Windows 10 did the trick. I reset the computer again and it once again found the card. I reinstalled my apps — this time, I'd put them all on a thumb drive — and was back up and running within 24 hours. I created a new restore point, did some work and shut down.

And this morning, it's gone again.

I did notice that the system did a security install yesterday, soon after my most recent reset, but I don't know what the contents were.

So, do I have a bad card? Is it time to ship this little guy off to someone for repairs? Or is there a system update that is interfering with the card's driver that's causing this and how do I work around it? Any help will be greatly appreciated!