Vista broadcom problems with Acer Aspire laptops.

Hi, just thought I would run this by you all.

I have an Acer Aspire 3020 laptop which I wish to run Vista on for testing purposes.   The problem I have is that although the broadcom wireless card is detected and a driver is installed I cannot connect to any wireless networks.

It appears that the wireless is not enabled.  There is a button on the front of the laptop which, in XP, you press to enable the antenna.  Now as far as I can see this enables the wireless mode in the driver in XP but it has no effect in Vista.

When you run the troubleshooter in vista it confirms that I need to press the wireless switch but when I press it I get the familiar "doh!" sound 

Anyone have any ideas

Thanks in advance..

Did you try and install the XP driver or have you used it with any other version of Vista?

No other drivers worked with vista up to beta 2. 

Im still stuck

** Update**

I had a look at the drivers installed under Xp and in the driver settings there is a radio on/off setting.    This setting is missing from vista.   Jus wondered if anyone knew how to get that seiing on the vista driver??

which drivers do automatically switch off the radio of WLAN? thats just silly, we have to kick the programmers asses [6] my, althought externally pcmcia wlan card does work like a charm with the standard vista drivers.

it could likely be that you have to install a utility or driver from acer to get your special buttons to live (if they aren't BIOS controlled and windows known).
or maybe you have a bios option for the default behavior of your WLAN antenna?

I installed Beta 2 and ended up using a Broadcom PCMCIA 802.11g card which works fine.   I would still prefer to use the built in wireless card but this will do until someone comes up with a fix for the wireless button.

Will post a solution here as soon as I find one.

Hi, I just installed windows vista, i have acer ferrari 4000 laptop which uses broadcom wireless card, but i managed to make it work ,  first i went to windows update which downloaded new updated bvroadcom driver after installing and restarting i went to network center, at the left chose reorder wireless networks and there i chose add and put my wireless network info after clicking ok, wireless card button started flashing its not steady light like used to be under windows xp, but it works

To use the wifi button on the front you need Acer's software to enable it. Whether they do a Vista version or you could use the XP version I don't know.

Don't know if you found a solution yet....but i was just ran into the question on this forum...

This is what i did to get it working on my Aspire 5024WLMI...

Use the launch manager file from acer and b4 running the setup file,  right click the setup.exe ---> properties ---> system compatibility ---> run in compatibility mode for xp sp2 and check the box that says "Run as system administrator" (when I tried installing without this checked, everything BUT the WButton.exe installed and that's the main file needed for the wireless to work )

Then run the setup and when it asks to reboot, hit reboot later and go to C:\program files\launch manager (assuming C is where you installed it) and change the following files settings to run in compatibility mode for xp sp2

ChkMail
CtrlVol
Fn
HotkeyApp
LaunchAp
OSDCtrl
Powerkey
WButton


Hope that works out for you...

Oh yeah...I've only tried this in x86 so for x64 i would suppose you change the settings to be compatible for xp x64 and the follow the rest....just a thought....