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Solved: Internal Wireless Card in laptop won't connect to secured networks, only unse

4K views 6 replies 3 participants last post by  killme 
#1 ·
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?
 
#2 ·
Vista drivers are compatible with Windows 7, in most cases. So....Vista hardware driver issues will also become Windows 7 hardware driver issues. Did you check to make sure the Atheros didn't have any updated drivers that were never installed?
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Try booting up in "Safe Mode With Networking" mode. See if you can get a wireless connection, using WEP or WPA.
 
#3 ·
Windows 7 automatically installed the drivers. There are no Windows 7 drivers at Acer's web site for my model. There are Vista drivers and I tried those, but nothing changed. I tried Safe Mode with Networking, but I had the same results. I tried a USB Zonet Wireless adapter and that did work, which is what led me to try an Intel internal wireless card.
 
#4 ·
Are you using the same wap key on the acer laptop as you do for you secured network? That is required. The key has to be identical to the one set in your wireless router.
 
#5 ·
Yes, when I try to connect it will actually say incorrect password. When I enter the correct password it just tells me Windows was unable to connect.

I'm using the original Vista installation now with the original Atheros card and it's behaving differently, but still not connecting. Windows says it is connected, but the access is Local Only. IPCONFIG reports that it has an assigned IP address and it matches the subnet of my network. I logged in to my router and I can see the laptop listed there, but I still cannot get a reply from my router's IP when I use PING.

Sometimes the results of the PING will say "Request timed out", but most of the time it says "Reply from 192.168.2.149: Destination host unreachable".

192.168.2.149 is the laptop's IP, and the router's IP is 192.168.2.1 which is what I was pinging.
 
#6 ·
You should Click the Report button and ask a moderator to move your thread tothe Networking Forum. You would get more knowledgeable advice there.
 
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