W500 - No Wifi device detected

Hello, I am unable to use any Wifi functionality on my W500. In Windows 7 I am unable to see any references to wireless networking in the Device Manager or in any of the Acer tools (the bluetooth slider is there, but nothing for WiFi). WiFi used to work, and the networking card is not broken. I put it in another laptop and it worked fine. I also tried putting an Intel Iwl3945 card in the W500 just to see if it was detected and it is not, i.e. no new hardware detected messages etc..

Also I booted a Linux System Rescue CD (on a USB stick) and lshw shows the Athereos device but "rfkill list" only shows acer-bluetooth. This is was not the cse before. It seems to me there is a kill switch on somewhere. Pressing Fn+F3 does not work in Windows or Linux (meaning nothing happens).

I've tried reseating the device and installing the the drivers from the Acer site, but the installation program told me the device does not exist. The BIOS tells nothing of networking. What can I do? Thanks.

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neonowl17

Ok...well I REALLY pulled my hair out on this. I tried every key sequence I could think of from both Linux and Windows, went through all of the Windows 7 options trying more drivers and nothing worked. I even bought a replacement wifi board (not the Atheros adapter, but the rectangular logic board that it connects to) and a new WLAN ribbon cable. Still the same problem. I then went through what small list of BIOS options were there and found the option to reload the default configuration. I did this, and the Network Boot option went from disabled to enabled, and after "Network Boot : " an identifier string showed up. When I booted up Windows 7, viola! the network card is detected. Also from the Linux System Rescue CD, "rfkill list" shows both wifi and bluetooth radios enabled (also "lspci -v" now detects the Atheros card).

So in short, if this happened to you - reset the default configuration. For whatever reason this BIOS gets testy if it thinks there isn't network capabilities and locks out the OS. If this doesn't work then you may have hardware issues.

BUT...Fn+F3 still doesn't work - if you need WiFi in Linux or plan to replace Windows - first enable WiFi from the Acer Tools and in Linux/Other OS use rfkill to enforce a soft block if you don't want radio functionality temporarily; or use a hard block if you physically want to turn off the radios.

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