{"id":471,"date":"2016-12-11T00:02:19","date_gmt":"2016-12-11T08:02:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/eriknovales.com\/?p=471"},"modified":"2016-12-11T00:02:19","modified_gmt":"2016-12-11T08:02:19","slug":"upgrading-the-wireless-adapter-of-a-dell-xps-8900","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/eriknovales.com\/?p=471","title":{"rendered":"Upgrading the Wireless Adapter of a Dell XPS 8900"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Because it was kind of difficult to find information about this, I figured I would post some details about a tiny little upgrade that I did to a Dell XPS 8900. It originally came with a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.dell.com\/support\/home\/bb\/en\/bbbsdt1\/Drivers\/DriversDetails?driverId=75CY9\">Dell DW-1801 wireless adapter<\/a>, which only supports 802.11 b\/g\/n, and not ac. Also, it doesn&#8217;t support the 5 GHz frequency, which is really unfortunate.<\/p>\n<p>All of this means that wireless performance is kind of shaky upstairs in our house. I had started researching Wi-Fi extenders, and then went to check to see exactly what 802.11 ac profiles our router and wireless adapters supported, and was shocked when I realized what the problem was. I remembered that our XPS 8900s came with integrated wireless, and I seemed to remember that it was an <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/M.2\">M.2 device<\/a>, so I looked to see if I could just swap out the wireless card with something better.<\/p>\n<p>Amazingly, in spite of all of the exhaustive specification information you can find on the Internet, it was actually pretty hard to figure out what M.2 physical connector the existing DW-1801 card used. I tried looking through my system and service manuals, and wasn&#8217;t able to find that information anywhere.\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/en.community.dell.com\/support-forums\/desktop\/f\/3514\/p\/19662660\/20857449#20857449\">This thread on Dell&#8217;s support forums<\/a> was the best\u00a0source of information I found, and indicated that it is size 2230 with key A E.<\/p>\n<p>I looked around to find a replacement adapter, and ultimately opted for this <a href=\"http:\/\/ark.intel.com\/products\/86068\/Intel-Dual-Band-Wireless-AC-8260\">Intel 8260<\/a> NGWMG that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.newegg.com\/Product\/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833106284\">I found on Newegg<\/a>. Before installing, I went ahead and downloaded and installed the drivers from Intel. The physical installation was pretty straightforward, once I found the correct screwdriver to take off the old adapter and antenna wires. On bootup in Windows 10, the adapter was recognized and it started working perfectly once I rejoined the network.<\/p>\n<p>So, yeah, for curious people on the Internet &#8211; you can, in fact, upgrade the wireless adapter in a Dell XPS 8900 with a third party M.2 card.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Because it was kind of difficult to find information about this, I figured I would post some details about a tiny little upgrade that I did to a Dell XPS 8900. It originally came with a Dell DW-1801 wireless adapter, which only supports 802.11 b\/g\/n, and not ac. Also, it doesn&#8217;t support the 5 GHz [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-471","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/eriknovales.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/471","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/eriknovales.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/eriknovales.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eriknovales.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eriknovales.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=471"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/eriknovales.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/471\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/eriknovales.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=471"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eriknovales.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=471"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eriknovales.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=471"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}