Replacement Wireless Cards? Best options?

So the wireless card on my XPS 12 sucks.

It has connectivity problems all the time...Drops connections, says limited connection all the time. I have to reboot over and over to get it to connect.
Stock is Intel Wireless N 6235.

Don't care about Bluetooth really...
What other options do I have here?

I believe it is Half-size mini PCI-e.

 

The "AR9380" , great range, reliability and speed. At least for me.

 

Could you provide the Service Tag. So that others reading can check on the specs and what expansion options dell offer for it. That would help know what internals it has..

 

The Advance 6235 is actually a pretty decent card. Sounds like you got a lemon.

The Intel Extreme 6300 is a step up, but you lose the bluetooth. There are the Bigfoot cards also, though they are more prone to driver-related problems.

 

From what I can tell, the bigfoot tend to get a good driver every two release or so, but I don't own one so take that comment with a grain of salt. I have seen some rare cases where bluetooth caused issues with the Intel cards and disabling it fixed things, but that was a while ago and I think it was on the 6230. Anyways, the 6235 should be a pretty good card, but if you're having issues, you might as well try the AR9830 or the Intel 6205 or 6300. I've had only good experiences with the 6200 and 6300 personally. Also, note that to take advantage of the 450 MBps speeds the 6300 can provide, you need a third antenna as well as a router that supports three streams, if you plug two antennas into it, it will behave like a 6200.

 

From my personal experience. It boils down to 3 choices.
Atheros ar9380 has probably the best unobstructed thoroughput of any other plus you gain access to a superb suite of modded drivers which greatly reduce dpc latency. It's range performance is competitive but not as good as I would like.

The Intel 6300 is slower with much less throughput but it has excellent obsructed performance I. E better range.

Killer cards will give you both range and thoroughput but their drivers have been a bit shaky in the past plus they're very expensive.

 

well i had intel 5300 and 62xx cant recall exactly as well as 1000.

The basic 1000 is utter rubbish, sharing wifi makes it crash all the time, drops connection, unreliable connection.

5300 and 62xx had similar issues, though only with some routers...

6300 works brilliantly as long as it had around 60%+ signal strength, under that it gives bandwidth but the ping makes any online game unplayable. if the signal strength is alright, it works perfectly though. Also it does seem to show better signal, however doesn't perform much better at same range than 62xx or 5300 that i had... Though 3rd antena seems to improve signal by a fair bit over the lesser versions of intel cards...

Have not tested 450mbps option on 6300 though.

also intel drivers are updated quite frequently addressing various bugs which is really good, though the dashboard software works like crap, share wifi doesn't work half the time, wifi direct doesn't communicate with my phone (galaxy s3 or xperia x10)...

 

AFAIK the Intel Centrino 6235 is supposed to be a good option for wifi.

Maybe you got a bad one?

I have an Intel Centrino 6205 (2 bands and no bluetooth) in my T530 and it works well.

My X220 came with the Intel Centrino 1000 (only has the 2.4 band, and not 5.0).

So I ordered a "used" Intel Centrino 6205 from ebay at $15 and $3 shipping. LA area seller (Rosemead, CA) that sells many of these things, so it's likely that he sells at the Pomona (LA area) CA computer show, and that the small boards haven't actually seen much if any real usage. But then odds are that a small board and chips like these have an extremely long lifetime even when actually used by a real laptop user.

BTW be aware that some (many?) laptop brands (like Lenovo) whitelist wifi parts like 1000, 6205, and 6235. They're all same size, so not to worry on that.

 

this was the case with my "AR" it was the same card BigFoot uses but, it work great with normal Atheros drivers. It blows what ever came stock with my laptop out of the water!

 

The 6300 work as a 6200/6205/6235 with two antenna (wifi)
You can try a 9380 or 9382(300 mbps, should work the same as 9380 with two wires), though I doubt you will get better performance.

 

New to forums, been working on systems for a long time. I had a toshiba tablet which worked perfectly with its wireless card on windows xp. So i upgrade to windows 7 and all of a sudden the card disconnects randomly, signal strength is weak... tried all variations of drivers... nothing worked and Toshiba listed the tablet as windows 7 compatible. So i decide im going back to XP cause i cant use the wireless card pretty much ever. I downgrade to XP and same problem.
HERES THE FIX:
I took the entire machine apart. dusted, re did thermal paste... reinstalled windows 7 and XP as dual boot and everything works perfectly now. So before investing the money in the new card options you can always try that it might help.