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]
