Need to install wifi driver on gateway 400sd4, win vista,

Go to your network and check to see if your WIfi is enabled

Hi,

According to Gateway, you can request a Recovery CD here, but if you are out of warranty it will cost you.

But the Gateway website has all the drivers available for the SD4 here, so if you can get windows installed onto it, you can install the drivers one by one..

Also, here is the main SD4 webpage if you need any more documentation, etc.

If you bought a full retail version and not an upgrade, you may need to do a fresh installation of windows. You also need to make certain that your gateway model is able to upgrade to windows 7. Checking your computer's support page, there are no BIOS updates available. Your computer should be fully capable of upgrading to windows 7 from windows Vista. ALso looking at Gateway's support page for this model, there are no drivers offered for Windows 7. All drivers offered are for windows Vista. I have seen computers in the past that will not tolerate an operating system change from the system that was installed at the factory.

If you have a restore partition, you can back up your data, and do a clean install of windows after formatting your hard drive. You may also want to make recovery disks for your computer in case the Win 7 will take on your computer or you cannot get your hardware to work with Win 7 since Gateway offers no Win 7 drivers.
Good luck. Take precautions to back up data and be able to revert to your original factory settings if necessary.

I suspect your problem is with the drivers for that WiFi-B card. You didn't say what the make & model is of that card, but most manufacturers have not updated their older products for Vista (older WiFi-B & not-so-old WiFi-G cards included). If you're trying to force some older Windows 2000 or XP drivers to work in Vista, you're bound to have issues. You may need to replace that card with a new WiFi device that has drivers for Vista. If that device is USB 2.0, you'll need a USB 2.0 PCMCIA card because the built-in USB ports are only 1.1. You should be aware that this laptop supports only 1 PCMCIA card.

There are other problems with your setup, as the hardware of this system just is not up to running Windows Vista well. First, the graphics hardware does not support the shading instructions and DirectX 9.0+ needed for the "Aero" interface included with the Home Premium version of Vista. Second, Vista might run with only 512MB of RAM (the max this laptop will support), but not well; it really "likes" around 2GB of RAM or more. Third, the BIOS of this system (even the latest and last update) does not support 48-bit LBA (logical block addressing), so it can only "see" hard drives up to 137GB. Any hard drive capacity above that will not be seen by the system, and may result in some drive corruption. At best, you will not have use of the full capacity of that 160GB drive.

Lastly, even if you can get all of the Vista drivers needed for this system's chipset and such to work properly, you will probably not be pleased with this system's inability to run the "Aero" interface, or with the performance limitations when running under Vista. My suggestion would be to remove Vista and install Windows XP. That is what this system was designed for, and all the appropriate drivers are readily available -- possibly including the correct one for your Wireless-B card.

Download all drivers off this page onto a Pen drive, memory card or DVD

http://support.gateway.com/product/default.aspx?partNumber=5386

and install.These are all the drivers for the laptop. Hopefully you have not changed the os to VISTA as these drivers seem to be for Windows XP. These may also work in vista.

Go into device manager and make sure the drivers for the ethernet controller are there. If they are, uninstall them, then do a hardware search. It will find the port and install the drivers automatically. If the drivers are installed and everything shows correctly, then it may be the port itself.

try disabling the sound and rebooting, so that vista thinks its a new device and reinstalls

You have to download XP drivers from the manufacturer's website. This normally happens because your harware was designed for the new OS(Vista).

Just go to hp.com and search for the model of your Laptop.

Lets give this a try. First update your version of windows.
Than download and install the latest drivers for your system.
This web site below will explaind how to download & how to install.
http://support.gateway.com/support/drivers/getFile.asp?id=19457&dscr=Gateway%20600YG2,%20600YGR,%20450ROG,%20450SX4,%20400SD4%20Video%20driver,%20version%206.14.10.6343&uid=181279516