[SOLVED] Best option to replace wireless card on aging adapter?

[consptheory77]

I have an old laptop, a Samsung "Series 3" NP300E5C that I plan to send off to a relative. Now, the wireless function in the laptop didn't work, so I plugged in a TP-Link AC600 USB Wifi Adapter Archer T2U Nano which gets decent speeds but doesn't max out the bars. But I had another problem, with the time always being wrong, and after trying other solutions and ruling out other causes, it could only be one thing - the CMOS battery. Which I didn't want to do, it's such a pain, I had to unscrew everything, but I replaced the CMOS, and so that problem is fixed, but while I was there, I observed the dysfunctional Mini-PCIe Half Card, and figured I'd take that out. Except that when I screwed everything back in, the loose antenna connectors were sticking out from the battery bay, which means I have to unscrew everything all over again, and set that right. And if I'm going to do that, I might as well get a new internal wireless card. Now the dysfunctional card is an Atheros AR5B225 B/G/N. Could I improve upon that? Well, it seems like I could replace it with an Intel AC 7260, which looks like it comes highly recommended, but what revision? Does it matter? My relative does not have internet at home, he has a cell phone, and might use the cell phone's mobile hotspot to access the internet on the laptop. So is having "a/c" good enough, or do I need the "b/g/n" too?

 

[bill001g]

I suspect in the fine print it says it support b/g/n. 802.11ac has all the 802.11n encodings as part of its standard. In effect they renamed those but they are identical so they will all work together.

It likely also supports "a" since 802.11b does not run on 5g.

Mostly the support for the very old protocols doesn't matter a lot. You seldom see anything slower than 802.11n.

 

[chaoyang]

Remember to also reset your laptop before giving it away to your relative. And reinstall the drivers if any weren't properly installed after reset.