Help needed Dell Inspiron 17

Hi All,

Just wondering if anyone can help. Bought my dad an inspiron 17 laptop the other day with windows 8. I uninstalled window 8 and installed 7 64bit. All went fine and i downloaded drivers off the dell site successfully.

The wifi driver has become a nightmare though, it seems to be a wifi bluetooth combo. When i enter my service tag on the website it says the driver is compatible with windows 8,7 64 bit 32 bit etc however every time I try to install the bluetooth installs fine but the wifi fails because the device cannot be found or the software is not compatible.

I have opened the case and found the serial number on the card, googled that and it seems to be a generic broadcom chip that dell use in most of their laptops, at this stage i must have tried 20 drivers which all say should be compatible, I have even gone back multiple revisions to before windows 8 was even released and no luck.

Has anyone got any ideas before I have to re install 8?

Is there generic drivers or anything that might work, I remember previously having issues with my vostro trying to find drivers to work but sorted it eventually.

tks
Dave

yoyo

Goose81 wrote: »

Hi All,

Just wondering if anyone can help. Bought my dad an inspiron 17 laptop the other day with windows 8. I uninstalled window 8 and installed 7 64bit. All went fine and i downloaded drivers off the dell site successfully.

The wifi driver has become a nightmare though, it seems to be a wifi bluetooth combo. When i enter my service tag on the website it says the driver is compatible with windows 8,7 64 bit 32 bit etc however every time I try to install the bluetooth installs fine but the wifi fails because the device cannot be found or the software is not compatible.

I have opened the case and found the serial number on the card, googled that and it seems to be a generic broadcom chip that dell use in most of their laptops, at this stage i must have tried 20 drivers which all say should be compatible, I have even gone back multiple revisions to before windows 8 was even released and no luck.

Has anyone got any ideas before I have to re install 8?

Is there generic drivers or anything that might work, I remember previously having issues with my vostro trying to find drivers to work but sorted it eventually.

tks
Dave

Something worth trying is running Windows update and see does it pick up a wifi driver for the system. Drivers are typically listed in the optional updates section. It is possible, but unlikely there is no driver out there for this particular chipset on windows 7.
Another thing worth trying is to put the HWID code listed in device manager for the unidentified adaptor in www.pcidatabase.com to see the exact chipset in use. A guide to locating the HWID is here. This may help you locate the correct driver

Nick