Dell E7440 Wifi upgrade?

Hi,
thanks for reading and any help given.

My Dell E7440 came with an Intel ac7260 wifi+bluetooth combo card, and it was very problematic, so I downgraded it to a Centrino Advanced 6235ANHMW, which has been excellent, which looks like this:

Since I didn't have an 802.11ac access point, dropping to 802.11a didn't really matter. I've now got a decent access point and would like to upgrade.
When I look at an Intel ac8265 card, the connector is quite different, like this, so I can't use that type of card.



Can anyone suggest a really high performing wifi + bluetooth card that will fit in the older miniPCIe socket type?

thanks!

 

After problems with the Intel card, I switched to a Broadcom-based BCM4352 card. They are cheap and readily available on eBay. It works well, but as a caveat, I have to use drivers dated 2013 or earlier (Windows has an appropriate driver built in). If I use drivers newer than that, it regularly BSOD's on me.

 

I'm in the same boat - both my e7440 and e6530 use the half-size mini pcie wifi slot. Everything after the 7260 (7265 and onwards) use the M.2 slot I believe, so we're kinda stuck with the cards we have. Fortunately I don't do anything that requires ultra-fast network speeds, so it doesn't really change much.

 

the best I can do over 802.11a/n wifi is about 80Mb/s, but I would hope to get a lot more with 11ac

At the moment if I want to transfer a load of big files, e.g. photos and videos from my camera, I plug in a network cable.

 

What types of problems did you have with the 7265? I have the 7265 in my E7440 and have no issues. Just keep the drivers up to date. I can get 250mb/sec throughput when connected to my AC access point. Range is pretty good as well.

 

On Linux the ac7260 wifi card would simply stop passing traffic, sometimes I'd have to disconnect and reconnect, other times I'd have to completely turn wifi off and back on using the switch on the side!
In Windows, it wasn't as bad, but still had the same problems.

I had a Lenovo T540p at work with the same card, and had to invoke support to get a replacement card which was a lot better but I still had to dis/reconnect to bring back a working connection! Since Lenovo whitelist wifi cards, it wasn't possible to simply swap the card for one off ebay like I did with the Dell.

There was a very very long discussion about the problem on the Intel support forum, with many others affected, and Intel being unhelpful and failing to admit there was a problem.