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Posted on December 09, 2006 by jay_sheth2. Edited: December 13, 2006 by jay_sheth2.
HP Pavilion DV6105us - Tip on Getting Built-in Broadcom Wireless Card to Work
Update 3:
Well, the solution I tried in Update 2 did not work. But, I have some good news. I bought a USB wirless adapter by D-Link from NewEgg.com. It's the D-Link Wireless G DWL-G122 USB Adapter. (It was $20 after a $10 rebate. And it arrived very quickly - NewEgg.com is just great!)
I deactivated the old (and somewhat useless) Broadcom Wireless G device in the Device Manager. I then installed the D-Link driver from the CD, and restarted the computer. I eagerly inserted the tiny D-Link device into the USB port, and waited. It was discovered successfully as a new hardware device. It then asked me for a "WEP key". In my wireless G home network configuration, I have two keys, a shorter "WEP phrase" and a longer (28 character) key. At first I entered the shorter "WEP phrase". It then tried to connect to my home network, but got stuck at the "acquiring network address phase". I knew something was wrong. So I went into the properties for the wireless connection, and re-entered the longer key. I then disconnected from the network, and re-connected. Finally, it worked!
It seems that the built-in Broadcom device with the HP Pavilion 6105 laptop does not work some 60% of the time. Now I know why this laptop was so severely discounted. People must've been returning it in droves. Besides this rather serious flaw, it seems otherwise fine (knock on wood). I was close to returning this laptop, but it seems D-Link has saved the day!
Update 2:
With a bit more investigation, I found out the specfic error that occured when the Windows Device Manager showed a yellow exclamation point icon next to the Broadcom Wireless entry. If you right click on the entry and choose "Properties", you get this error: This device cannot find enough free resources that it can use. (Code 12)
If in the Device Manager you choose "View | Devices By Connection", then choose "PCI bus", you'll see that the Broadcom Wirless device is listed under the "PCI standard PCI-to-PCI bridge" section.
With a bit of googling, I came up with a somewhat older article that described problems eerily similar to mine:
The problems occur when the motherboard manufacturer has added a PCI-to-PCI bridge to extend the PCI bus further, or a daughter board or backplane with PCI bus slots has a additional PCI bridge incorporated. These are usually 'positive decode' PCI-to-PCI bridges. The standard Windows PCI drivers do not support enumeration of 'positive decode' PCI bridges. This means that on these systems you are likely to have problems with allocation of resources. These problems usually show up as failures of the PCMCIA controller in Windows 9x/Me/2000 and XP as 'Code 10' or 'Code 12' failures and a 'No PCMCIA controller found' message in Windows NT4.
It goes on to add:
This motherboard contains the nVIDIA® nForce 420D Chipset, and the offending PCI-to-PCI bridge is the nVIDIA-nForce PCI Bridge made by nVIDIA Corporation. Other motherboards with this chipset (like the Asus A7N266-E) may also not be supported in Windows, but we have no test results for these.
So, it seems an older version of nVidia was involved in the situation described above, with a similar "Code 12" error occuring with a PCI-to-PCI bridge. I'm no hardware expert, and I don't really understand how PCI-to-PCI bridges work, but I thought I'd give upgrading the NVIDIA GeForce Go 6150 to the latest driver available through Windows Update (Date last published: 10/18/2006, Download size: 52.6 MB). I installed it, and it asked me to reboot.
This time the wireless connection did work! Let's see if this was just a one-time success, or if this fix lasts. I'll keep you posted.
Update: after a couple of days of hassle-free working, the new driver played the same trick on me: it stopped working. Rebooting Windows a couple of times, the second time with the switch off while it was booting did the trick. I'm beginning to think that there is no logic that can predict when this device will stop or start working. The best solution may be to get another ExpressCard 54 / 34 card to put in the laptop. My old PCMCIA cards sadly won't work!
I recently bought a new HP Pavilion DV6105us laptop from Staples. It was a good buy, and had everything I was looking for: a 64 bit Windows Vista chip (an AMD Turion), enough memory, a decent hard drive, built-in wireless, and even a CD and DVD burner! The screen is really bright and glossy - it's the best looking laptop screen that I've seen or owned.
As I began using the laptop, I noticed a serious problem: every time I put the laptop into sleep mode, and then re-awakened it, it was not able to find any wireless networks. (As mentioned before, the laptop came with a built-in Broadcom 802.11b/g WLAN wireless "card".) Sometimes, even more strangely, it brought up the Windows "found new hardware" wizard. Ironically, this wizard did not know what kind of hardware it had just detected, and was of no use.
I searched HP's laptop support site, and downloaded what seemed to be a new driver. It in fact was the same driver that came with my laptop. The driver version that came with laptop had the following information (from the Windows Device Manager):
Version: 4.40.19.0
Date: 3/23/2006
The actual driver's name was BCMWL5.SYS.
Since HP's "updated" driver was of no use, I tried Broadcom's site next. Their site was not at all useful - their search engine was unable to find anything related to my card, and their product page had no links to any drivers. It's a shame that Broadcom, unlike other vendors, does not make drivers available from their site.
I then searched Google, and found a lot of pages on getting this card to work under Linux. I love Linux as much as the next geek, but this time around I was running Windows XP (shame on me, I know), and I needed it to work with XP, not Linux.
Finally, I came across a message on Dell's support forums. Dell evidently uses the same wireless card in their laptops. The forum mentioned that I could get an updated version of the driver from Microsoft's Windows Update site.
That version of the driver fixed the issues I had with the card.
Here's how you can get it:
On Windows Update, one has to first choose "Custom". Then, one has to go to "Hardware, Optional Items". Uncheck the fifty or so non-hardware choices, leaving the just update for the Broadcom card (listed at the bottom).
Then install it. Your Internet connection may stop working after you install it. Just restart your computer, and it should now work correctly.
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