want to upgrade wifi card

I apologize if this is not the right forum, or if this has been discussed before. I have an old (10 years) Dell Latitude D830 laptop. It still works well, but I want to give it to a relative. I want to upgrade the wifi card to an AC card, if possible. The original card was a DW 1390 card that was the full size (whatever that means) 802.11g. I had an old Gateway laptop that was broken and removed the half size wifi card (802.11N) and installed it into my Dell D830. Other than the card not being locked in place with a clip (It is under the keyboard, so the keyboard keeps it in place), it works real well. But now I want to upgrade it even better with an Intel 7260 IEEE 802.11ac with Bluetooth 4.0 wifi adapter. This laptop did not originally have Bluetooth installed, so that would be an added "bennie".
Does anyone know if this will not work? I'm hoping that it will. I tried to ask this question on the Dell Community forums, but could not logon for some reason. Hope to hear from someone soon.

Thanks!

 

Yeah it'll work. You will need to source a half-sized to full-size miniPCI-E adapter plate which you can probably buy off of eBay or similar for $1-$2 shipped. And you'll probably have to use the WWAN antenna set instead of the WiFi triple set on account of the physical lengths of the antenna leads.

The Atheros AR9380 (ie: Apple-branded cards) work very nicely as well, and give you true triple-stream capability, as a drop-in replacement. You'd have to get a Bluetooth 360 module, probably a couple bucks on eBay as well (the cable to plug it in should be present!).

BTW, the D830 is only 9 years old at this point. If it has the Nvidia accelerator, it will eventually fail for that reason. Otherwise, the life limiting component tends to be the CCFL backlight in the screen. You can upgrade to the T9300 CPU for pretty cheap as well, which I've found to be quite worthwhile.

 

Thanks for the info. My apologies, yes it is only 9 years old. I looked into the price for the T9300. It was fairly cheap ($37.00), then I looked at the T9500. What a big price difference ($108.00)! Yeah, I'll stick with the 9300.
While searching for the Atheros 9380, I came across another from Atheros; the WLE600vx 802.11ac dual band. This one is a full height card which would negate the need for the adapter plate. Will this work?

If you don't mind, please explain the issue with the Nvidia accelerator. Is this built into the mobo? Is there anything that will signal it's imminent failure? I really appreciate the help and suggestions.

 

There were 3 versions of the D830. The D830 with the Intel 965gm "embedded" graphics. And D830s with either the Nvidia Quadro 135M or Quadro 140M discrete graphics processor.

The Nvidia-chipped equipped D830's are highly prone to failure on account of the well-known defect. A class action lawsuit was settled a few years ago in the USA, and more recently, in Canada, relating to such failures.

The Intel equipped ones don't have such defect.

As for T9300's, are they *really* that expensive now? I bought mine I think for $20. The T9500 was a huge bump up which I didn't feel justified.

And yeah, that QCA9882 card should work just fine.

 

Side note...9 years is really pushing it for a computer, especially for a laptop. Any day of use after the 5 year point should be considered a blessing. You sure you want to give a laptop that is end of life and as pitz said, is know for failures?

 

Just to clarify, the only D830's that are affected by the Nvidia bug are those with Nvidia accelerators, namely, the Quadro 135M and the Quadro 140M.

My D830 has in excess of 30,000 hours of run-time (as recorded in the HDD/SSD's hours counter) and 4000+ power cycles. So its fairly robust hardware. I only "retired" my D830 (well, really, relegated it to running Linux and sitting on my desk as a backup) because the 4gb of RAM was limiting and I needed an upgraded screen. Otherwise, it ran Windows 10, Office 2016, etc., usably well.

 

I thank you both for your inputs and recommendations. My D830, unfortunately, does have the Quadro 135M controller. As far as showing any signs of degradation, it hasn't consistently shown any (yet). But I'm sure it will eventually. Right now it's running Windows 7 (not updatable) and Office 2010. I do have a new Dell Inspiron 15-5555 that I am using now.
I've always been the type to try to improve or upgrade as much as possible, and even though penguinslider stated the expected life cycle of most laptops, I might still try to make changes as long as they are not too pricey. I might even look into running Linux on it (once I learn Linux, of course). Thanks again to you both.