Acer F5-773G I've spent hours attempting to fix my Laptop's Wireless issue

I have an Acer F5-773G.

One day the wifi option just disappeared. Odd, maybe my GF hit the hotkey on accident to disable the wifi. Nope, that didnt do anything, tried enabling it manually and nothing. I tried the troubleshooter and it didn't detect the adapter at all, I went into device manager and it

wasn't there. I got it to show up in the "Show hidden devices" but it would not let me do anything with it, this drivers hardware is not connected, please re-connect hardware. Is the card inside the laptop maybe knocked loose? I'd rather not open it up unless I needed to, i'm not a hardware expert by any stretch.

I then uninstalled the adapter, and attempted to re-install. The Qualcomm Atheros wasnt on the list in add legacy hardware, so I tethered my phone and attempted to locate it automatically, did not find any matches. I went to Acer's page, put in my SN and got the list of Drivers, retreived and installed both of the WLAN drivers ( qualcomm first) and restarted after each. I still dont see any network driver in my device manager.

These are the two Drivers from the acer page :

Wireless LAN Wireless LAN Driver (NFA435) Atheros 05/04/2016 12.0.0.191 321.3 MB Retrieve
Wireless LAN Wireless LAN Driver Intel 05/04/2016 18.33.0.1 95.55 MB Retrieve

And I watched this video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Z5rRnjWGAk

Any Help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

[Edited the thread to add model name to the title]

Accepted answers

Puraw

https://community.acer.com/en/discussion/695985/ive-spent-hours-attempting-to-fix-my-laptops-wireless-issue

Aspire E17 E5-773G?
PdaNet (picture you posted) is a popular Android application that should not even be on your W10 system. This is a 2016 W10 laptop that you can open up (no warranty issue) to check the Wi-Fi adapter type and connections. Acer Support provides many Wi-Fi drivers for 3 adapters: Intel, Broadband and Atheros. Those are different chip manufacturers and thus each driver is for a different wireless card.

Take off the back of your laptop and find the square wireless card that has a black and white antenna cable going to it.
Will look like this: https://www.laptopinventory.com/ModelDetail.php/Acer/Aspire/E5-773G/WifiCard(BlackMatte)/40630

You can hopefully find the type on a sticker/label on that. check the slot connections and note down part number of the W-Fi card. Close and boot, try also if Bluetooth is working (does not look like it on the screen you posted), BT is on the same card. You can try to install each LAN Wireless driver from Acer Support (make sure you enter the correct laptop model number) individually and see if it works, if it is not the right driver then W10 will tell you during install.

Alternatively, google the part number and buy a new Wi-Fi card online (see link above) but make sure ID and part numbers are identical.

billsey

Yes, I am thinking it is likely an Aspire E5-773G as well, there are no F5 models that I know of. It's a fairly old machine, vintage 2016, and the stock WiFi/Bluetooth card only does either 802.11a/b/g/n (Atheros card) or 802.11a/b/g/n/ac (Intel card). Note that in the Device Manager image the Bluetooth is grayed out, so likely the card has failed. The card has an M.2 interface though, so assuming it has failed it can be replaced with most of them on the market. Stay away from the Intel AX201/211/411 cards because they use a different protocol. I'd suggest an Intel AX200 as a good replacement card. It should be around $20 to replace and you can still use the existing antennas. If you are uncomfortable with working inside the machine, and decent tech can do it in a few minutes.

All comments

Puraw

https://community.acer.com/en/discussion/695985/ive-spent-hours-attempting-to-fix-my-laptops-wireless-issue

Aspire E17 E5-773G?
PdaNet (picture you posted) is a popular Android application that should not even be on your W10 system. This is a 2016 W10 laptop that you can open up (no warranty issue) to check the Wi-Fi adapter type and connections. Acer Support provides many Wi-Fi drivers for 3 adapters: Intel, Broadband and Atheros. Those are different chip manufacturers and thus each driver is for a different wireless card.

Take off the back of your laptop and find the square wireless card that has a black and white antenna cable going to it.
Will look like this: https://www.laptopinventory.com/ModelDetail.php/Acer/Aspire/E5-773G/WifiCard(BlackMatte)/40630

You can hopefully find the type on a sticker/label on that. check the slot connections and note down part number of the W-Fi card. Close and boot, try also if Bluetooth is working (does not look like it on the screen you posted), BT is on the same card. You can try to install each LAN Wireless driver from Acer Support (make sure you enter the correct laptop model number) individually and see if it works, if it is not the right driver then W10 will tell you during install.

Alternatively, google the part number and buy a new Wi-Fi card online (see link above) but make sure ID and part numbers are identical.

billsey

Yes, I am thinking it is likely an Aspire E5-773G as well, there are no F5 models that I know of. It's a fairly old machine, vintage 2016, and the stock WiFi/Bluetooth card only does either 802.11a/b/g/n (Atheros card) or 802.11a/b/g/n/ac (Intel card). Note that in the Device Manager image the Bluetooth is grayed out, so likely the card has failed. The card has an M.2 interface though, so assuming it has failed it can be replaced with most of them on the market. Stay away from the Intel AX201/211/411 cards because they use a different protocol. I'd suggest an Intel AX200 as a good replacement card. It should be around $20 to replace and you can still use the existing antennas. If you are uncomfortable with working inside the machine, and decent tech can do it in a few minutes.

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