Upgrade internal wireless card

[ChadTravis71]

I am wanting to upgrade the wireless card to an AC. What specifications or specific models would work with my system?

[Paul_Tikkanen]

Hi:

Before you can upgrade the internal wifi card to a dual band one, you have to first let me know how many antenna cables are connected to the wifi card in there now.

There has to be two.

The parts list seems to indicate that there are two antenna cables as the description is:  Planar Inverted-F (type) antenna (PIFA) - For 802.11A/B/G/N WLAN card, but please confirm this to be correct.

http://partsurfer.hp.com/Search.aspx?searchText=N0A97AA

[ChadTravis71]

Yes. You are correct. There are two connections for the antenna. Thanks for your assistance.

[Paul_Tikkanen · Accepted solution]

You're very welcome.

OK, since you have confirmed that there are two antenna cables connected to the Broadcom wifi card, you can upgrade to this dual band AC wifi card with Bluetooth...

Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 7260 802.11 ac 2x2 WiFi + BT 4.0     HP Part # 710661-001

The card is readily available on eBay or Amazon, and won't cost very much.

Search by the HP part number, not by the model number of the wireless card.

You can get the latest drivers for it from the Intel website, but W10 will automatically install an older set of drivers.

Before you install the new card, I suggest that you uninstall the BCM wifi and Bluetooth drivers in the device manager (right click on each device, select Uninstall and check the uninstall driver box.

If there is any Broadcom Bluetooth software listed in the Windows control panel>Programs section, uninstall that too.

Then shut down, unplug the PC and swap out the wifi cards.