A buddy of mine purchased a Toshiba NB205-N311/W (CNET Review) netbook over the weekend and knowing how fond I am of tinkering with new toys he asked for my help installing Windows 7.
Excited to finish this project and get on to the evenings (social) festivities I wasted no time removing the netbook from it’s packaging and blowing away the existing XP and Restore partitions replacing them with a fresh install of Windows 7 32Bit. For those unfamiliar with this process there is plenty of information available for performing the installation over a USB device or PXE boot.
Toshiba provides beta Win7 drivers for the various components in both 32 and 64Bit flavors on their website. After installing the drivers all appeared to be working as expected with the exception of Wi-Fi and the function keys on the keyboard needed for volume, brightness ect.
Wi-Fi is provided by an onboard Atheros AR9285 chipset. After installing all of the available driver packages available from Toshiba I noted that Windows was still using a Microsoft supplied driver for the AR9285. Digging through the Toshiba driver packages it didn’t appear that Toshiba was actually supplying a driver for the device; instead relying on the Microsoft supplied driver.
While attempting to connect to a Wi-Fi access point the Windows wireless management utility would clock for a moment, and report that it was “Unable to connect” to the network. This behavior remained consistent while trying to connect to access points from various hardware manufactures (I tested against AP’s from Apple, Linksys, DLink and Netgear) using various encryption standards (none, WEP, WPA(2)) with or without broadcasting the SSID; I even went as far as upgrading the firmware on my Apple Airport 
.
Doing a bit of googling I found that many people were having various problems with this wireless chipset on Win7. (I even read a thread where the poster felt that this chipset was crashing his Linksys router) The most common problem was the inability to enable the wireless radio after installing Win7 as indicated by the LED light on the front of the unit. In our situation the LED was lit indicating that the radio was active, and had no problems detecting the presence of Wi-Fi APs.
Skeptical of the Microsoft supplied driver I began to look for other netbook manufacturers who included the AR9285 in their product. I found that HP included a Atheros supplied driver in their sp42654 driver package which worked perfectly for me; Thanks HP!
You’ll need to extract the specific driver from the package and manually install it. I didn’t attempt to install HP’s driver package but doubt it’ll install on the NB205.
- download HP’s driver package
- run sp42654.exe, extract the files to an alternate location (c:\temp works)
- After the package decompresses, go ahead and exit the installer (It likely wont work anyway)
- From device manager, find the Atheros deivce, chose update driver, pick a driver from a location, browse to the location of the extracted HP drivers and select the INF file. The INF contains instructions for a handful of Atheros chipsets, be sure to chose the AR9285. Windows will give you a warning that it can’t validate that the driver is appropriate, acknowledge and proceede.
- At this point you can nuke the extracted HP drivers (perhaps at c:\temp)
Fixing the Function keys was a much simpler task. I noted that they stopped working after installing the various Toshiba drivers. By process of elimination I determined it was the software for the integrated flashcard reader was the culprit. This software can be easily disabled at startup via msconfig. In the event that the flashcard reader is needed, the software can simply be started.
- From the run menu (start button, or file / run in Task Manager) type `msconfig`
- On the Startup Tab, uncheck the Toshiba Flashcard Utility. Click OK
- Reboot
If the flashcard reader is needed in the future; undo the above process, or manually run the executable (listed in the startup tab in msconfig)
Tags: Atheros AR9285, Drivers, Toshiba NB205, Windows 7