Question WiFi and Bluetooth problem on Lenovo G460 ?

[sempak]

Hi. My old laptop won't detect any wireless connections from wifi or bluetooth. I need it to work for drawing tablet. There's no driver support from laptop manufacturer for Windows 10. Please suggest best replacement for the wifi card if it really can't be helped. Thank you

Lenovo G460
rPGA motherboard
intel p6000
integrated graphics
3GB ddr3l sodimm
intel centrino wireless-n 1000
Windows 10 Pro 22H2

 

[bill001g]

What you are looking for is called a wifi pcie half card. Almost all laptops used to use that format. The modern laptops use m.2 wifi cards. It does make it easier to swap them out but finding newer wifi that is also not a m.2 card is a bit tricky. They do make them. I have found even wifi6e devices.

Read the details to see if they also have bluetooth.

These are kinda a niche market so not a lot of manufactures.

 

[sempak]

What you are looking for is called a wifi pcie half card. Almost all laptops used to use that format. The modern laptops use m.2 wifi cards. It does make it easier to swap them out but finding newer wifi that is also not a m.2 card is a bit tricky. They do make them. I have found even wifi6e devices.

Read the details to see if they also have bluetooth.

These are kinda a niche market so not a lot of manufactures.

So can any pcie half card be used? The motherboard is 988 pin rPGA.

I just read about bios whitelist. It adds more complication if my laptop has one.

 

[bill001g]

It is not likely there is a bios restriction on a consumer laptop. Mostly you see that on dell or hp laptop designed for corporate use. It isn't even the old scam where they wanted to force you to buy their more expensive parts. Modern bios list on these type of machines are because the IT departments do not want employees upgrading the machines and then they have more software support calls for all the different combinations of drivers etc.

It is a extremely old machine so it is likely it is end of life support wise. If there is some whitelist it will have none of the modern cards.

I would just try it and see laptop wifi cards are fairly inexpensive 802.11ac (wifi5) cards are under $15 and even wifi6e are under $30.

 

[sempak]

How to know if the wifi card is dead?

If it still healthy and just lack driver, isn't the device manager usually just flag it with warning signs but still show the device?

Mine is simply not shown beside there's no more support for newer windows

 

[bill001g]

If it doesn't show up at all then it is likely defective.....or it might be disabled in the bios or with some button. Laptop tend to have the ability to turn off the wifi card.

Although it likely will not change your plans to buy a new card what you might try is a linux USB boot image. These are mostly to test and repair computers. These linux images have drivers for a lot of older devices that windows does not. They can though not have all the drivers for a particular laptop and they are tricky to get installed when you are not actually installing linux to the hard drive. It is a pretty simple thing to try and it will not hurt your windows install. If the wifi is working you should get menus to set and scan networks.

In the longer run you might be better off going to linux. Microsoft is already constantly nagging that windows 10 is no longer going to be supported....even though I can 't run windows 11 on the machine it is complaining about.