The IT Crowd, a super funny British television series that revolves around the adventures of technical support workers in a large corporation.
Dealing with ASUS this week made me feel like I was calling in to Roy for tech support. The ASUS tech’s name was Pig Zhu, he advised me to get an RMA to send my little friend in.
What is wrong with my laptop? Well it came with Windows 8.1 and it got the Windows 10 upgrade nod, so I went for it. It ran great for about a week, then it got a Windows upgrade and the Broadcom 802.11abgn driver stopped working.
A quick perusal around the net confirmed I was not the only one having issues. So I spent some time downloading drivers off the ASUS site, from the support pages of laptops and tablets that contained the same WIFI chip, since my laptop did not have Windows 10 Broadcom drivers.
After no driver I tried worked, that’s when I filled out the support request on the ASUS site, Pig’s response was not what I expected. There was no way I was going to send a perfectly good laptop on a 4 to 6 week journey just because of a driver issue. I wasn’t about to rollback to Windows 8.1, the only thing left to do was a clean install of Windows 10.
Windows 10 installed just fine off a USB key, but nothing really worked, other than the Logitech mouse. I had to use the on-screen keyboard to get signed on the very first time. Luckliy, I had made a backup of the Windows 8.1 rollback folder, $WINDOWS.~TMP, which contained a Drivers folder. Fired up Device Manager and pointed any device not properly configured to the 8.1 drivers.
Pig, if you’re listening, it’s fixed.
Hello, IT. Have you tried turning it off and on again? Uh… okay, well, the button on the side, is it glowing? Yeah, you need to turn it on… uh, the button turns it on… yeah, you do know how a button works don’t you? No, not on clothes.