Acer Aspire V5-171 Wifi button greyed out and not working. URGENT

TheSalami · August 2016

Hello all. So a day ago my Ethernet wasn't working and I couldn't rely on a wired connection, so I looked at some fourms and was told to remove the Broadcom NetLink (TM) Gigabit Ethernet driver, which is what I did, and I restarted the computer. When I turned it back on I reinstalled the driver and the ethernet worked. But the WIFI did not.

So I looked up how to fix it and attempted to reinstall the driver and I also added another driver in the process. None worked and I've tried nearly everything to fix it. Installing a new driver, reinstalling, flushing dns, disabling and enabling the service, even reinstalling the BIOS, and tons of other stuff but I've had no luck so far. The wierd thing that happens is the WIFI option is greyed out but the Network Connections say it's enabled.

Also, in Device Manager when I go to the Broadcom NetLink (TM) Gigabit Ethernet driver it says "Device Not Started" Any idea what's causing the immense amount of problems I'm dealing with on my computer?

P.S. I won't be able to post for a few days, because of a trip and I cannot bring my computer because it's usless if I don't have ethernet. So please hurry because I will be leaving tommorow. On 8/8/16

Thanks, Brad

Acer-Mary · August 2016

Sorry you are having problems with your Acer. You have done much of the troubleshooting already. At this point to rule out a hardware problem with the ethernet card, back up your data and restore the system to factory configurations. Test the ethernet to make sure it is working and if not, then we would recommend repair.

TheSalami · August 2016

Thank you for the help. I resolved the problem by resetting back to an earlier save point without affecting my files. Worked like a charm.

But I still wanna keep this tread going for reasons why this happens and ways to fix it for other people.