Upgrading network interface card....

[kurohashi]

Hello,

I want to replace my laptop's wifi+bluetooth RT3290 card with an a/b/g/n/ac supporting card with at least 300Mbps support and dual antenae as I am going to purchase an AC router. My bios version is F27 which I got from the official driver support. No hardware replacements have been made yet.

Would anyone give me some suggestions as to which NICs will be best for my laptop having all the above specifications.

Thank you.

[Huffer]

Here's the Service Manual:

Manual

See p. 51 for "how to". The good news is that there is an easy access panel to the wireless card so you do not need to spend hours in disassembly. The bad news comes in two parts. Firstly, your laptop is right on the cusp of the notorious HP wifi "whitelist" era where the BIOS will cold stop any effort to install a wireless card other than the few listed in the Manual, none of which come close to your specs. HP has never published a definitive list of laptop models that are past the whitelist so we have had to kind of figure it out by second-hand trial and error. Mostly your trial, our error. Your model may or may not have the whitelist, in simple terms. We don't know until you experiment a bit. 

The second possible problem is that you may have only one antenna wire lead. If so, any upgrade to a better card is very very difficult and would require nearly complete disassembly. 

So, the first step is to open the access panel and count antenna leads on the existing wireless card. The path forward is radically different depending on whether the answer is one or two. 

Post back if you have more questions. 

[kurohashi]

It has only one presently.

[Huffer · Accepted solution]

Well you can completely disassemble the laptop and add a second antenna lead if you want to upgrade the internal card, or use a usb 3.0 wireless/bluetooth dongle. The is no 802.11ac wireless card that can operate off a single antenna. Also we have not even figured out the whitelist issue to see if you could install a different card even if you added an antenna.