Laptop Wifi Problem Acer Aspire 5720

pendulum · 13 April 2010 at 12:23PM

Hi,

My laptop's about 18 months old. A few months ago it stopped connecting via wireless. When I pressed the Wireless button to make sure the card was enabled, it would say "No device found", and it would not show in Device Manager either. This went on for days. Reinstalling the drivers had no effect because the wireless card was not being found.

I decided to try reinstalling the OS as a last ditch effort, to see if it fixed the problem, and it DID! At least for a while. Then it did the same thing again, except this time I remembered that the night before it had installed some Windows updates. I thought hmm... since the reformat worked it pointed to a software issue, so I wondered if the Windows updates were responsible. I uninstalled the recent updates and yep, it fixed the problem.

Until this morning - now its happened again. I was using the laptop last night until about 3am to play poker in bed, and the wifi was working fine. Once I had finished playing poker I shut down the laptop in the usual way. I didn't change any settings or do anything unusual to it. I also don't remember it installing any windows updates last night - and having checked in Uninstall Programs/Updates, there are no recent Windows updates that are showing that can be to blame.

When I turned it on this morning it did not connect automatically to the network like it usually does. I pressed the wifi button to make sure it was enabled and it come up the familiar "No device found" error. And the wireless card no longer shows in Device Manager again.

I have just booted from my Ubunto live CD (the first time I've ever used it on my laptop) and I got the wireless working fine using Ubunto. I took the disk out, rebooted back into Windows, and still get the same problem.

I have a feeling that if I reinstall Vista, it will work again for another few months, but I would like to get to the bottom of this problem and find out why it keeps happening, if anyone knows?

Thanks