Precision M6500 - Installed Logitech Unifying Receiver in mPCIe Slot!

I thought about that route but I use the ExpressCard slot often, so it wasn't a permanent solution for me. The places I soldered are easily reversed if I need to.

 

Thanks for a great idea and a great thread! I only wished I had found this a long time ago. For more than a year I've been trying to get my M6500 to boot from the secondary drive (an SSD) and still consider the first drive it's drive 0 in Windows. The reason is simple: I have a work related software that I am totally dependant on, and I have an old licence that's attached to the hard drive and another licence attahced to a dongle. And I hate that I have to take the dongle with me because I'm very bad at forgetting things in my summer cabin when I drive the two hours home or home when I drive to the cabin. Which means an extra, unnecessary trip. But for some reason I can not get it to accept that drive as drive 0. It insists on having the SSD or the data drive, a 1 gig drive in a caddy where the DVD-ROM should be, as drive 0, no matter how I juggle the drives inside the computer.

But with this method I won't have to worry about it! As long as I have my laptop, which I never forget, I will also have the dongle. I have ordered the parts from eBay, and I found out that even with the memory modules installed underneath the keyboard it's no problem fitting the dongle there. I'll be using crimp hose to make sure that it doesn't short circuit anything. The dongle is to thick to fit in any of the spaces underneath, and since the license is worth around twice as much as the hardware I'm not going to file off anything.

 

Sounds good. Good luck. Glad the write up helped someone.

You won't be able to change the drive order as the BIOS sees them.. but as far as Windows or other OS's go, it really doesn't matter because you can put the bootloader on any of them.

 

Well, the thing is that the BIOS seems to see them in the right order. I have the correct drive in the drive 1 bay, and still it isn't recognized as drive one in Windows. And unfortunately the main thing here really is how Windows see the drives, because the software I use checks the drive ID of the first drive before it starts, and if the drive Windows reports as drive 0 (which I can't get the correct drive to be no matter what I do) is not the one the registration is tied to, it won't start the program. But I hope my problem is solved now, when I get this PCI-E card!

 

I am going to do the same thing (internal USB) with my M4600. Here's the adapter I found to use:

PM3U ( MiniCard to USB2.0 Adapter)

 

Of course now they make this thing!

It might be the pictures, but it kind of looks too tall for the M6500.

Also, if I recall, the M6500 didn't provide power via the PCIe port for USB. I had to steal it from another source. I think the PCIe port only have 3.3V or something.

 

I'm thinking of getting this one, but the shipping is at $18 when the product is $15.

Anyone thinking of joining in a group-buy to save on shipping?

PM3U ( MiniCard to USB2.0 Adapter)

This looks solid.

 

Did you check what I mentioned about USB power? There is no +5V in the spec, so unless your device works on +3.3V, or the card has some kind of cap circuit to increase the voltage, it won't work.

 

Oh, I actually missed that.... I wasn't looking at the second page when I wrote this so I missed it.

Thanks for the heads up!

 

Thanks for the guide. I was looking for the 5V. The fan was a brilliant idea.

I have a Studio XPS 13, so space is quite sparce in there. I had two options where to put the unifying receiver: Either in the same mpcie slot or in the Caddy that sits in the optical drive bay where my SSD currently is. But putting it there meant disassembling most of the notebook and complicated wiring, which I was too lazy to do.
So I tried to build something like PM3U linked above myself, because I already ordered an adapter card like the one muzicman used.
I ran into the exact same problems.
First of all with the USB Connector on top of the adapter card, the height of the whole construction was way to big, at least 4 mm! (The PM3U won't work for most people because of this probably). I solved this by cutting out part of the adapter board, so the receiver would fit in there.
I cut out as much as I could without damaging the D+ and D- lines on the card. It fit perfectly.
Furthermore the card wouldn't sit right because of the headers, so I removed both of them and soldered a 180° USB connector (I removed the outer clamp too) directly to the vias.


I then pulled the crimp out of the fan connector and soldered the 5V wire directly to the crimp and put it back in the connector.
The advantage is that this can easily be reversed without any trace, since I didn't have to cut into the insulation of the wiring.

Because of the metal case of the SXPS13 I only get about 2m range, but that's perfectly fine.