So a friend brought his laptop over for what is becoming a regular event down here for me.  That is to wipe Vista off the machine and load it up with XP.  I think this is my 3rd laptop in 2 months.

So his was an Acer Extensa 5420-5038 and finding the drivers for it seemed pretty straight forward and easy enough..  You can simply go to acer.com and search around until the site leads you to them or you can pull them up on the Euro FTP here: ftp://ftp.work.acer-euro.com/notebook/extensa_5420/driver/

Or for the proper webcam drivers go here and go through notebooks>extensa>5420:

http://us.acer.com/acer/service.do?LanguageISOCtxParam=en&miu10einu24.current.attN2B2F2EEF=3750&sp=page15e&ctx2.c2att1=25&miu10ekcond13.attN2B2F2EEF=3750&CountryISOCtxParam=US&ctx1g.c2att92=453&ctx1.att21k=1&CRC=2054404012

And there seems to be an abundance of wireless drivers for you to choose from however you’ll soon discover that none of them work.. None of them at all, none of the XP drivers, none of the Vista drivers, hell I even found XP Pro and XP home driver variants..  Nothing on the Acer website, nothing anywhere that would even detect the card at all.. Well almost anywhere.

In the end I finally tracked down a mediafire link that much to my surprise provided a driver set that actually worked..  So to hopefully save you the hassle of going through all these hoops and trying 100 drivers out just head here: http://www.mediafire.com/?ctxvypzdb3d and get that wifi working.

Oh and surprise surprise the ATI/VGA video drivers provided everywhere for this computer also don’t work, so you will need to go to ati.amd.com search through the integrated graphic card drivers and then find the x1250.