How to reinstall Laptop

marcycn43

I have an Acer Aspire e 17 that belonged to someone who died and no one knew his password so I had to reinstall 8.1. There is only 4GB RAM so I don't want to bring it to Windows 10 and when I reinstalled it to the original 8.1 Home he gave me some problems I was unable to fix. Sorry, it's been days ago and I don't remember specifics. Anyway, I had the 8.1 64bit ISO on a DVD so I changed the BIOS to boot off the DVD drive. It did it's thing and asked for the key which I put my PRO key in and it took it ok. 

It went through all the steps and ended up with what I thought was a working Windows 8.1 Pro laptop.

Problems:
NO WIFI and no way I could find to add it. It had WIFI when I did the first reinstall to Windows 8.1 Home.
When I went to the Programs in control panel there are NO programs there. That's a first for me and my experience goes back to Windows 3.1.
Couldn't change the date/time. It was set to the International Date Line and nothing I did would changed it.

I've looked everything up through Google that I can think of and nothing seems to work. The biggest light bulb here is that there is nothing installed for apps even though it said it was installing apps at one point. I tried both custom and express install. I've tried to install 4 times.

My question is this: How do I get a clean, workable Windows 8.1 Pro OS on this machine? Oddly enough, I have the the same laptop and bought it with Windows 8 on it back when that was the way to go.

Tmzdroid

Have a look in device manager for any missing drivers then download them using a machine with internet access and install them manually using a flash drive. You could also try connecting up a mobile phone via usb to use for tethering to get you online. Also a Lan cable connected up to your wifi router might work or a universal wifi dongle. When you get online give everything time to update also the time and date should sync automatically. Good luck.

marcycn43

Yikes, I just read what was posted.  I have no idea where all that about 8.1 came from.  That was a long time ago and has nothing to do with what I'm having trouble with now.