I shudder when i see "eMachines"...
LOL ... Yah I know what you mean. I have yet to have a rebuild of one w/o original install disc's that ever went smooth. This is a friends laptop that I cleaned up for him by wiping drive clean and starting fresh. I expected the Sound, Video to be where I was going to be hunting for drivers and the sound was the common AC97 Realtek and the Video Driver for the SiS GPU was also easy to find. The last driver to get for this was the Broadcom Wireless Card and I thought I should be out of the woods, was thinking to myself this has been the most painless eMachines rebuild yet, and then it struck me... I should have not thought this as for I jinxed myself with that thought seeing Broadcom as the MFR of the device.
Salmon:I tried the driver you linked and it goes through the install process running Setup.exe, then rebooted the system and still shows up in device manager as not satisfied. I then tried to manually point the reinstall driver to the home directory where the driver is located after this expands and it still wasnt happy.
Patio:I didn't find a chipset driver package, but I found a download link "FINALLY" that looks promising. Located here:
http://support.gateway.com/us/en/emac/product/default.aspx?modelId=1669 which is 76MB in size, which looks promising since most regular NIC's are not that large in size. For lack of description at this website as to if its for the Broadcom Wireless G or not and now at work I cant test it yet, I will have to test this after I get home from my 12 hr shift.
Thank You both for your time trying to hunt down the driver for me!
I also forgot that Gateway bought out eMachine, as this link above indicates. And I remember that Acer bought out Gateway. 3 of the lesser quality name brands now combined..
Fortunately I dont have to deal with too many eMachines or Gateways anymore, but sometimes driver support for even well known name brands like HP or Toshiba can be a pain as well, especially if using an OS that was not the intended original OS from manufacturer.
I still have an eMachine motherboard linked here:
http://www.motherboards.org/mobot/motherboards_d/Trigem/Imperial-GLVE/ at home that I use for older games, testing, and running automated processes. 5 years ago I went crazy trying to find the video driver for Windows XP and no support for it on eMachines website, and when i finally found the right driver to get better than 800x600 resolution, to get the 1024x768 which I wanted, I made sure to save a backup copy of this driver, so that I'd never have to go through this mess ever again with that motherboard. Sure enough when curiosity got the best of me and I tested Windows 7 32-bit home premium on the eMachines Motherboard TriGem Imperial 2002_1111 GL_VE Socket 478 Pentium 4 2.0Ghz with 1GB Ram (which I got originally for free as a Celeron 2Ghz and 128MB Ram)... the upgrade from Windows XP Pro SP3 to Windows 7 32-bit Home Premium went well with exception to having to find a video driver for Windows 7 and Intel's legacy support only covers Windows XP as the newest OS supported. I was able to force Windows 7 to take the XP driver for Intel 845GL North Bridge and get 7 to have better than 256 colors and 640x480 with 1024x768 and 16-bit color. But Windows 7 32-bit was really a stretch for this 11 year old motherboard, and so I reverted back to XP Pro SP3 which runs fast and healthy on this hardware that was manufactured during the Windows XP OS era. The only modern OS that runs well on this hardware is Linux, and I have a removable drive with Mint 14 on it as a OS choice.
