Solved unable to find wifi driver package for toshiba satellite u840

[ineuw]

Uninstalled my Toshiba satellite U840 (5-6 years old) WiFi driver by error and now I can't find any info, or support for the equipment. The OS is Windows 7 Home Premium, The Ethernet card is Atheros and the wired connection works fine. But I am completely stumped by the WiFi setup.

The Device Configuration shows an unknown network card, which I assume to be the WiFi card, but there is no name, and no driver. How can I go about tracking it all down and figuring out how it can be corrected.

Also downloaded and installed several Atheros packages claiming to be for wireless connection, but they did nothing. Of the three possibilities, I eliminated Atheros and Intel with their driver update utility, so I think that the uninstalled software must have been packaged with the other Toshiba utilities I removed. I can't even find these utilities and I am lost. Can someone please help?

 

[oscer1]

can you list the hardware ID's for the wireless.

have you tried doing a system restore to a point before you deleted things?

 

[johnhoh]

there's a lot of U840s so make sure you input the right one here..

Satellite U840-SP4201L Support | Toshiba

or just run the Toshiba Service Station and select software updates

http://toshiba-service-station.software.informer.com/download/

 

[oscer1]

I see the thread is marked solved could you tell how it was solved?

 

[ineuw]

1. The link provided by johnhoh, listed four options in the Network section and I found the driver by process of elimination.
2. Also, was nothing to indicate in the software or hardware that any component was Realtek. The two Realtek drivers were almost identical with a very minor difference judging by the version numbers.
3. Also eliminated Atheros (which drives the Ethernet chips) because I downloaded and installed several Atheros wireless packages and none worked.
4. I did remember uninstalling something from Intel, so I installed Intel first and worked on the first try. While installing, Intel immediately began the search for WiFi sources.
5. Probably the safest bet would have been the Toshiba package which probably includes all possibilities (but haven't installed it yet).
6. Below are the list of choices.

1. Intel Wireless LAN Driver
2. Realtek Wireless LAN Driver
3. TOSHIBA Application & Drivers Patch
4. Realtek Wireless LAN Driver

All in all, I am very disappointed with Toshiba's approach. This is a 2011/2012 laptop with a 1.5MHz four core i3 CPU, 4GB of RAM, and it is very slow.

 

[MrWhoopee]

All in all, I am very disappointed with Toshiba's approach. This is a 2011/2012 laptop with a 1.5MHz four core i3 CPU, 4GB of RAM, and it is very slow.

Your system is slow because...

It's an i3 processor, you can't expect much.
It has 4gb of RAM. If it's a 32-bit system, that's as good as it's going to get. If 64-bit, you need to add more RAM.
It's a 5 year old Windows installation. A clean install of Windows would improve performance markedly.

 

[ineuw]

Your system is slow because...

It's an i3 processor, you can't expect much. It has 4gb of RAM. If it's a 32-bit system, that's as good as it's going to get. If 64-bit, you need to add more RAM. It's a 5 year old Windows installation. A clean install of Windows would improve performance markedly.

MrWhoopee, I agree with everything you wrote. Afterwards, I realized that there were a number of contributing factors for the slow speed. It was loaded with numerous bloatware from Toshiba and used McAfee antivirus, all of which loaded itself at startup.

Replaced McAfee with Avast, uninstalled the garbage, and removed all non-essential utilities from Toshiba, as well as resolved the Event errors. I looked for installed Windows updates and there were NONE!. It took Windows overnight to install some 135 updates. Then, I cleaned up a gigabit+ of temporary files, defragmented the drive, and now it works bit faster.

I found out that the computer was stored in the closet for most of the past years and it was never used long enough to allow Windows updates. The only installed app, aside from what I mentioned above, was a complete Apple suite for Windows, which was used to download and store the contents of the owner's iPhone!