Acer laptops and Atheros Wifi

[jonathanhaddock]

We have a number of Acer laptops here that contain Atheros Wireless controlers. Unfortunately, the wireless controller seems to be disabled at boot time and if the student doesn't move the slider to turn the card on during the XP splash screen they take ages to find the domain.

 

I've tried to find the Atheros Wireless utility but apparently there isn't one installed on any laptop. I was hoping that like the broadcom utility it contained a tick box like "bring online before authentication".

 

Does anybody know how to stop this infuriating behaviour, apologies if this has been asked before.

 

Jonathan

[Joanne]

have you had a look in the bios?

[RooJ]

I've experienced the same issue with a set of 30 acer travelmate's bought last year. After much ringing around it was confirmed that the model we bought didnt support starting with wireless enabled by default. It was recommended that we flash to the latest bios version which might solve the issue, but i was also told in the same breath that if anything went wrong we wouldnt be covered by the warranty .

I've actually found that pupils manage just fine starting the wireless themselves so for now I've left it as is.

 

Oh and i did notice acers inbuilt power management software starts the wireless itself after logon, but sadly i couldnt get it to work as a service running before logon.

[ricki]

I have had this problem 2 I dont remember the make of the laptop but it was a buffalo card. What we had done was install the drivers from the wifi card cd. Because it was not using the windows files it would not kick up till you logged on. As you had no wifi connection you could not log on.

 

Brill

 

What I had to do was uninstall the driver from add and remove programs and then get it to detect hardware. When it found the card we told it to search the cd for the driver and that just cured the problem.

 

I have also seen the same thing with some netgear wifi cards and usb sticks.

 

Richard