But when I went to take the antenna connectors off of the stock card (the Broadcom) that came with the computer… the little, tint round connectors on the card itself came off inside the antenna connectors! I tried to gently dig them out for almost an hour, finally damaging them pretty badly. I waited a week to get it, was excited as all get-out. So, I ordered this one, the Intel 2nd Generation Dual Band (7265): I have had such trouble upgrading mine! I also have the XPS 8900. Posted by Erik Novales DecemPosted in Computing Post navigation
So, yeah, for curious people on the Internet – you can, in fact, upgrade the wireless adapter in a Dell XPS 8900 with a third party M.2 card. On bootup in Windows 10, the adapter was recognized and it started working perfectly once I rejoined the network. The physical installation was pretty straightforward, once I found the correct screwdriver to take off the old adapter and antenna wires.
Before installing, I went ahead and downloaded and installed the drivers from Intel. I looked around to find a replacement adapter, and ultimately opted for this Intel 8260 NGWMG that I found on Newegg. This thread on Dell’s support forums was the best source of information I found, and indicated that it is size 2230 with key A E.
I tried looking through my system and service manuals, and wasn’t able to find that information anywhere. I remembered that our XPS 8900s came with integrated wireless, and I seemed to remember that it was an M.2 device, so I looked to see if I could just swap out the wireless card with something better.Īmazingly, in spite of all of the exhaustive specification information you can find on the Internet, it was actually pretty hard to figure out what M.2 physical connector the existing DW-1801 card used. I had started researching Wi-Fi extenders, and then went to check to see exactly what 802.11 ac profiles our router and wireless adapters supported, and was shocked when I realized what the problem was. Also, it doesn’t support the 5 GHz frequency, which is really unfortunate.Īll of this means that wireless performance is kind of shaky upstairs in our house. It originally came with a Dell DW-1801 wireless adapter, which only supports 802.11 b/g/n, and not ac. Because it was kind of difficult to find information about this, I figured I would post some details about a tiny little upgrade that I did to a Dell XPS 8900.