WWAN adapter is not being picked up

[NigelThornberry]

I have an HP EliteBook 8540p. There is a slot for mPCIe WLAN mini cards on the underside in addition to the slot underneath the keyboard.

I have a specialized Netgear 4G WWAN adapter for use with Sprint and Verizon that was custom made for my company. The laptop boots just fine with it installed. However, there is no indication in Device Manager or the Windows Registry that the laptop acknowledges that the card is installed. It's like the laptop has the slot switched off.

Can I get any insight as to why that is? There are no acceptable adapters that are officially supported by the notebook. Even the little Dell D630s we have around the office recognize this specialized adapter, so I don't think the adapter itself is the problem.

I am on the latest BIOS. If I try a normal WLAN card the laptop will give me an error such as "An unsupported WWAN adapter is installed. Remove it and try boot again" or some such nonsense.

I was able to add my own GPU (Quadro 2000) to the MXM slot, so why can't I add my own WWAN card?

[Paul_Tikkanen]

Hi:

I'm very surprised you are not getting the unsupported wwan card message.

Does it show up as present and enabled in the BIOS?

HP notebooks all had BIOS whitelists that prevented any unsupported wwan or wlan card from being installed, until around 2013, when we as end users seemed to discover the BIOS whitelists were gone.

If the wwan adapter is present and enabled in the BIOS, maybe you just need to install the HP connection manager software, restart the PC and see if you can use the software to turn on the wwan card.

This package provides the HP Connection Manager for the supported notebook running a supported operating system.

http://ftp.hp.com/pub/softpaq/sp53001-53500/sp53394.exe

[NigelThornberry]

"WWAN FCC ID: No Device Present". However the  "WLAN FCC ID" does indeed have a valid value.

I will try HP connection manager.