Anyone put an Intel 7260HMW 802.11ac MiniPCIe card in their Dell Latitude E6x20 or E6x30?

I installed the Bluetooth specific driver. It did recognize the adapter, but the Bluetooth enumerator was gone. There was no Bluetooth icon on neither the notification corner nor the control panel. Not worth the aggravation so I retuned it.

Sent from my DROID RAZR HD using Tapatalk 2

 

It might be the interest of some users here that on Oct 21 Intel released new PROset Bluetooth software for the 7260 family, applicable to Windows 7, 8 and 8.1

I'd recommend to save the following link at your favorites and regularly check it. This will show related wireless & Bluetooth/Wireless software and driver releases:

https://downloadcenter.intel.com/Se...ductProduct=Intel®+Dual+Band+Wireless-AC+7260

Hope it helps

 

Anyone try this? Any updates?

 

Heya. E6530 and 7260AC gives me a weird startup problem. Most of the time, power button lights, battery light comes on, then off again after a second, screen stays black, no other lights come on, not booting. Backlit keyboard lights up when I type, but no disk activity. It turns itself off after 20-30 seconds. I can sometimes boot by removing and replacing the battery and AC multiple times, and booting off freshly-inserted battery only. This also keeps the machine from rebooting.

When it works, it's flaky, lots of issues. Same card in an E5530 works perfectly, and the E5530's 7260AC doesn't work right in the E6530, so it's either a problem with all 7260ACs and all E6530s, or maybe just a problem with all 7260ACs and just my E6530. Either way, we won't know till another E6530 user tries. Both cards work fine in the E5530, though, so the cards seem OK, I'll keep them and hope it works out eventually.

Does seem to be a really nice piece of networking gear, when it's working, but the drivers are still fiddly, and lots of little teething issues. I'm sure it'll mature to become my favorite network card.

BTW, The BT component on the Intel card does not require USB to function. It's a plain PCIe device, just like the WLAN itself. If you boot Linux and use lspci, it'll actually list a PCIe to PCIe bridge on the card, and the three devices behind it. One is BT, one is WLAN, and the third appears to be a virtual device, probably for management of the other two. Works pretty decently under Linux, with latest kernel and drivers, but there are some timeouts. There are problems with two or more BT hosts on one PC, though, only one will work. This is true for Windows and Linux, so I'm guessing it's something in the bluetooth design, that they never expected us to have multiple BT controllers on one machine.

On my E6530 it's pretty easy to get to the BT, so I removed it, on my E5530 it's buried deeper, and I just let whichever one starts first knock the other out (Windows gives code 43).

 

@Forge64. i probably has same problem:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/del...wierd-problem-after-cpu-swap-bios-resset.html

will check at evening

well in my case swapping back to original doesnot work.


do you reset bios after cards swap?

 

It does sound somewhat similar. I can boot without problems using my 5300, the original DW1540, or my Intel 6300. I hadn't wiped out my firmware settings after putting the 7260 in. Maybe I'll give that a go.

 

if you decided to do bios reset. check in bios hdd boot option.. in my case it was changed to raid and not boot

 

Finally got around to trying it, no change. With the 7260AC in the WLAN slot, boot becomes very infrequent. On the few occasions it manages to start booting, it generally fails with HDD blinking, batt+Wifi solid, which indicates CPU failure. CPU is repeatedly tested and known to be good.

Same 7260AC works great in my E5530. Guess I'll just look for another solution for my E6530. Also, now that I've worked with my Ult-6300 more, it never really works either. It'll boot, but throw a code 10 after driver install. It's a Lenovo-branded card, I wonder if that's related. My Dell-branded Intel 5300 works fine. Might try dropping my DW1525 in for laughs, just to test everything to death.

 

Oddly, I can boot with the 7260AC in the half mini accessory slot, no problem. The secondary wifi antennas from the full height slot do not reach, though.

The 7260AC booting every time in the WWAN-half slot, and only booting on occasion in the WLAN-half slot makes me think something is wrong with Dell's firmware configs. Doubt they'll bother to fix it, though, since it doesn't affect the officially supported configs.

 

7260ac worked great for me and added both dual band and bluetooth to my otherwise bluetooth-less and single band only crappy dell card latitude e5530