My friend gave me his laptop to diagnose. It's an Acer 5315 with an Atheros AR5BXB63 wireless card inside. He is running Vista Basic. It will connect to my network if I make it unsecure, but as soon as I enable WEP or WPA it won't connect. It sees the SSID and attempts to connect, but Windows just gives a message saying it can't connect. I bought a Sony Atheros AR5BXB63 on eBay to see if it would work, but I get the same results.
I installed Windows 7 on the laptop to test it and it wouldn't connect at all, whether it was unsecured or not. I went to another friend's house and removed the internal wireless card from his HP laptop and stuck it in this Acer 5315 and it worked. It was an Intel Wireless-N card.
The friend who owns this Acer laptop said it just stopped working one day. It's weird that neither of the Atheros cards work, but the Intel did. I'm thinking it's some kind of driver issue with the hardware and maybe my friend's driver got updated during an Automatic Update.
I plan to order the Intel 512AN_MMWW2 and stick it in the Acer and hope it works. Any ideas on why the Atheros cards didn't work other than a driver issue?
I installed Windows 7 on the laptop to test it and it wouldn't connect at all, whether it was unsecured or not. I went to another friend's house and removed the internal wireless card from his HP laptop and stuck it in this Acer 5315 and it worked. It was an Intel Wireless-N card.
The friend who owns this Acer laptop said it just stopped working one day. It's weird that neither of the Atheros cards work, but the Intel did. I'm thinking it's some kind of driver issue with the hardware and maybe my friend's driver got updated during an Automatic Update.
I plan to order the Intel 512AN_MMWW2 and stick it in the Acer and hope it works. Any ideas on why the Atheros cards didn't work other than a driver issue?