Acer Extensa 4420 driver problems

[SatoriTheLush]

A buddy of mine gave me his laptop and asked me to load up XP for him. No problem, right? Well, the XP drivers Acer provides all work except the ATI video driver and the Wireless LAN. The video I can do without - generic is providing sufficient resolution. The Wireless, however, is a must have. I KNOW this laptop has the Broadcom wireless onboard, but when I run the setup I'm still left with an unknown Network Controller in Device Manager and no wireless.

Incidentally, there are a pair of switches on the front of the laptop for turning on and off the bluetooth and wireless. They don't seem to work. My friend says that they worked fine before. But if the network controller is showing up in Device Manager, then we know the device is present. I just don't have the right driver.

Anyone seen this before? Any help appreciated greatly.

 

[cudaprime]

Download and extract the Dell R174291 package.
Then go to Device Manager and manually update the driver, just point to the extracted files.

 

[Tisserand]

I've found that this works for me when dealing with both Vista and XP - I've had to do a HDD wipe a few times on the Extensa 4420, and I always forget how i did it the last time. This has worked for me on both OS setups:

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090905122433AAUxArK

it links to this Dell driver: http://www.easy-share.com/1905854353/bcm43XX.zip

Just updating the found Network Controller's drivers by pointing to the extracted driver does the trick

-Ryan