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BSOD with wireless, tech support killed my wireless
Hello All,
Here's my problem. My Acer Aspire 5733Z-4851 had an Acer Update program on it. I downloaded the updates it recommended and installed them. I was getting blue screen crashes after that. I couldn't figure out what was causing it. Then, due to a router firmware problem (I didn't know it until i went into the router to change wireless password because I was getting ticked off I couldn't connect any longer, the update was done and I didn't change the password because after this update I was able to connect wireless again) I was connecting with a network hard cable. I noticed the blue screen crashes had stopped.
After the firmware update, I was able to connect wireless again so I unplugged the hard cable and resumed wireless use. After a couple of hours, I had another blue screen crash. The only thing that had changed was that I was back to using wireless to connect to the router. So I got a flash of insight that maybe conflicts with the drivers were causing the crashes so I called tech support and the tech walked me through uninstalling the wireless driver that was showing, Broadcomm.
He also had me uninstall ms miniport which was also listed in there. I read in an old post here or at another tech forum that it wasn't possible to uninstall it as it was part of Windows 7 in one reply to that post, another reply in that post said that it came with the person's wireless driver and he could just disable it.
Well, it seems that it is possible to uninstall it, as I uninstalled it as instructed by the tech and it hasn't come back. And it doesn't seem to be part of any of the drivers available for download for my model.
I know this because I reinstalled all the wireless drivers listed for my model after an online chat with another tech, she recommended doing a recovery of the system. I don't want to do that, I don't think I should have to do a recovery of my system and lose all my software and have to reinstall it again just to fix this problem. So I decided to hit the forums. Stopped here first, it seems very active and the replies to posts seem to be knowledgeable.
The wireless drivers the acer site lists for this model are Broadcomm, Intel, Realtek and Atheros. I thought this was too many drivers but decided to reinstall them all anyway, thinking it might be possible each one handled a different thing, for example the atheros driver seems to install something called fast reconnect.
Anyway, the techs at Acer didn't seem to be able to tell me what wireless chipset is in the system, they just wanted me to do a recovery. And ms miniport has never come back. And even after reinstalling all drivers, wireless is still messed up, and Win 7 network diagnostics can't seem to pin down the problem or fix it. The Acer vendor detector utility they told me to use says that it is a broadcomm board or chipset. But just installing that wireless driver alone (I did install the broadcom ethernet driver too) doesn't give me back wireless, diagnostics says there is a problem and it can't fix it. And still no MS Miniport.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.