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I happened to have an Intel AC-2960 dual band wireless card available that I had replaced with an AX card in a different laptop, so I thought I'd use it to replace the N wireless card in my  Pavillion dv6t-2300. I installed the card without difficulty, since it had the same form factor and antenna sockets as the old card, but when I went to start the dv6t afterward, it gave me an immediate error message that the card was unsupported and I would have to put the old card back in just to get the laptop to start again, which I did.  From reading other posts on this site, I gather that dv6's of my vintage have BIOS whitelists that block the installation of non-standard parts.  Is there any way to overcome this, either in BIOS or otherwise, so that the AC card would function with this laptop, or is the only workaround to upgrade the wi-fi getting a wi-fi dongle?  If I were to try a wi-fi dongle, is there some limit on which would be compatible?

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Hi:

 

All dv6 notebooks until the dv6-7xxx model series came out have BIOS whitelists.

 

There may be a BIOS mod out there for the dv6t-2300 that may overcome that, but you will have to find that on your own.

 

There is a BIOS mod website that may help.

 

Bios Mods -The Best BIOS Update and Modification Source (bios-mods.com)

 

Other than that, you are free to install any dual band USB wifi adapter you want.

 

Bear in mind that since your notebook has no USB 3 ports, most if not all USB dual band Wi-Fi adapters will not achieve their maximum advertised throughput.

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If I were to try a wi-fi dongle, is there some limit on which would be compatible?

USB2 is only .480 Gbps compared to 1.73 Gbps for the AC-9260

I suspect the older WIFi card is better than any dongle

 

There have been BIOS mod's for HP DV6 to remove whitelist.  I do not recommend it as you have a working laptop and I did not see a DV6T mod when looking.

 

There is a good discussion about whitelists by @Paul_Tikkanen here

https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Business-Notebooks/dv6-supported-wifi-cards-BIOS-white-list-update/td-...

 

@Paul_Tikkanen incredible, you beat me to it by seconds


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Do you know about when the dv6-7xxx series came out, so I would have some idea how recent a BIOS update would need to be?  I bought my dv6 in April 2010 and the newest updates I see after a cursory search are around October 2011.  Also, there seem to be an awful lot of model types for dv6's.  Just how close does the rest of the model number need to be to mine for the BIOS to work in mine?  Very few of the sites that offer BIOS updates for dv6's go to the trouble of listing the full model numbers that they apply to.  In my BIOS itself, the creator of the BIOS is given as 'Insyde', which appears to be a going firm.  Would there be any point in approaching them for an update, or would they not be likely to have any familiarity with how HP chose to use their BIOS's?

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I neglected to add to my reply to Paul:  What exactly is the significance of the 't' in dv6t?  I ordered my HP off their website, where I could customize it to some degree, CPU, RAM, etc.  I am presuming that a BIOS and its updates are specific to a particular motherboard.  Does the 't' or, say, the initial digit of the model number indicate a different motherboard?

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There aren't any BIOS updates that will remove the whitelist or add support for any other Wi-Fi adapters not listed in chapter 3 of the service manual, and yes BIOS updates would only work on a specific model dv6-xxxx series.

 

In other words, a BIOS update for the dv6t-2300 would not work for a dv6t-3xxx and visa versa.

 

If you didn't find a dv6-2300 whitelist mod on that website I posted the other day, then there is nothing you can do.

 

The dv6-7xxx model series came out in 2012 and would use totally different BIOS files that would not work for your notebook.

 

Back in those days, the 't'' stood for HP PC's with Intel processors and the 'z' stood for HP PC's with AMD processors.

 

CTO (Configured To Order) are the PC's where individual customers or retailers (Costco, Sam's Club, Walmart, Best Buy, etc.) could order PC's with available hardware configurations of their choosing.

 

On the newer models, if the model series ends in 'i' it stands for Intel and if it ends in 'a' then it is AMD.

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