LCD damage and keyboard not working on ACer7551G-7459

Chrifister

Hi,

Was recently given an old Acer Aspire 7751G-7459 laptop on its way to the garbage. It had significant damage. The LCD panel was shattered, the keyboard wasn't working properly, and the shell had impact damage on the bottom. It booted and an external monitor worked so figured I could salvage it.

Found the exact model on eBay in excellent condition but seller said the display didn't work. Got it for cheap. Swapped the motherboard to the eBay one and we have a working laptop. Well, almost working. Installed Ubuntu and everything seemed okay except no network devices were found. No ethernet and no wireless. Fiddled around for a bit and figured I'd try Windows 7. Still no network adapters. None showing in device manager. Tried installing the drivers and no luck.

Normally after installing Windows I would pull the necessary drivers and software from the manufacturer so off to Acer's site. Apparently Acer has forgotten they made this laptop because searching for SNID, SN, or model on the drivers page bring up nothing, for either laptop.

I tried swapping the AR5B97 wireless card from the other laptop and it wasn't detected either. So either the motherboard is damaged in one or two places that is preventing both wired and wireless adapters from working, or the actual ethernet and both wireless cards are damaged, or it's a software issue. Let's go with the most likely which is software. Since the BIOS is updated to its latest version, I suspect installing the chipset drivers may solve the issue. Looked up the motherboard by its model number and the Northbridge is AMD RS880M and Southbridge is SB820. Checked AMD for the RS880M chipset driver and of course they don't have it. Can't seem to find it anywhere.

So here I am. Also posted in the AMD community forums. I think the chipset drivers are what I need so where would I find them now? Is there another model of Acer laptop with this chipset that I can find on the Acer website?

[Edited the thread to add the title]

StevenGen

https://community.acer.com/en/discussion/672624/7551g-7459

Yea, Acer has stopped all support for the Aspire 7551G-7459. The oem fitted Acer networking card is the Atheros AR5B93 Wi-Fi only don't know why that other laptop had the Atheros AR5B93 Wi-Fi card (also check if this card is faulty?) The best link to go to and get all the Atheros drivers is at "Select Qualcomm Atheros wireless driver (ath-drivers.eu)" as all the Win-7,8, and 10 32bit and 64bit drivers are there for all these old cards.

Also I would suggest that you upgrade this laptops networking card to a Wi-Fi/BT card, type Atheros AR9462-AR5B22 < follow this link, as this card is a 300M Wireless Card and Bluetooth 4.0 Combo 2.4 & 5Ghz card and is what I did to an old Aspire 5750-2414 years ago that also had only a Wi-Fi only card and the upgrade with the appropriate Win-10 Pro drivers (yes your laptop will work with Win-10) worked for that laptop perfectly.

You must have the wrong chipset as its not the AMD RS880M as from what I can gather your 7551G-7459 has the Mainboard AMD M880G chipset Drivers and Software so follow that link and download all the AMD drivers and try that out.

Also, this is what I would do as far as upgrades are concerned (if you want to send any $’s on this laptop?) to make this laptop perform at its peak, then do this:

1. Upgrade the bios to its last version 1.18 dated 2011-06-14
2. Upgrade the Socket S1 (S1g4) AMD Phenom II N930 to an Phenom II X940 as that is a much higher spec cpu 2.4GHz and will give you about 40% increase in relative performance.
3. Upgrade the ram to its max at 8GB (2x 4GB DDR3-1600MHz) also
4. Fit a Samsung SATA 3 6GB/s 2.5” hard drive as all this will make this laptop perform excellently with Win-10 64bit like I had my old Aspire 5057-2414 work also.
5. You can also fit a mSATA SSD up to 256GB (if you can still get them?) as the 7551G also has an mPCI-e or a mSATA 8+18pin port.

Good luck😀 and hope this helps you out some