Y410P wireless card replacement questions

Hey everyone,

Is there any restriction on which wireless card I can put in? Any recommendations? I was looking at the Intel 7260, which has AC and supposedly reduced power. What would that translate into real world battery life?

 

Yes, Lenovo white lists their cards in the BIOS. You're stuck with the one that you brought, unless you use a modded BIOS that gets rid of the white list, and I don't think a modded BIOS has come out yet. And no, you can't buy a new card from Lenovo that will fit, and has their FRU number on it. They are not for sale anywhere on this planet.

 

Bummer! Well, thanks for the reply

 

Before you think about replacing your card, why not just unistall Intel PROset, reboot and use 14.8 drivers? Been using those for 6 weeks with no problems whatsoever.

 

Not if you have a good AC router or use WiFi a lot and actually care about wireless performance. Or even, god forbid, game on WiFi, because the 2230 is slow and inconsistent and tends to drop packets and get latency spikes for no apparent reason. Probably because it just sucks.

 

My router is an older AN model + i have an AC card on my desktop and i get a lot more packet loss on it than BOTH of my 2230's on my 17R and Y410P.

 

To be honest, my y410 hasn't even gotten here yet, so I'm not sure how well it will work on my network. But yeah, I think my router may be on its way out and I was looking at some fancy dancy AC routers.

I just wanted to educate myself on what is possible, because I'm used to building desktops. It makes me pretty upset that that I can't do what I want with something I bought. Not to mention, doesn't this fall into some monopoly/antitrust sorta thing? How do manufacturers get away with this? Is it really any harder to change a wifi card than ram or a hard drive? It's like a car manufacturer selling you a car that you can't put gas in lol.

Sorry that was my rant for the day

 

I definitely have issues with my 2230, I was at a LAN party a few weeks ago and had to run a 45ft patch cable from the switch just to be able to play properly. I am waiting on a BIOS mod to allow me to run a 7260. My wife's Samsung has a much better wifi signal, not sure what the card is, but its much more consistent than my y410p.

 

I can't play BF3 at all on WiFi because I get intermittent ping spikes and dropped packets, about once every few minutes. Since most BF3 servers have auto-kick for high ping I get booted whenever there's a spike, which is very annoying to say the least. I didn't have this problem with the Intel 6250 on my ASUS G73JH and nothing else in my network setup has changed so it's definitely down to the 2230 card. If you're planning to do any sort of latency-sensitive online gaming on WiFi the crappy WLAN card definitely needs to go. Obviously, being plugged in through the Ethernet port is the best but since this is a laptop that's not always feasible, especially if you're out-and-about.

 

I've said it in other threads, disable the Bluetooth device in device manager and I am 100% positive your lag spikes will go away.

As jobine suggested reverting to the inbox drivers will probably do the trick but if you want to keep the newer ones just disable bluetooth.

 

It doesn't work. I don't even have Bluetooth in Device Manager or anywhere since it disappears whenever you put the laptop to sleep.

 

Can confirm. I investigated the possibly of upgrading the card before buying this laptop (been burned before) Called all of Lenovo and crawled the entire web. I found manuals, part numbers and even drivers to these replacement cards but I'll be damned if I could just order them. I'm actually really disappointed since the laptop was pretty much perfect for my needs otherwise but this is a deal breaker for me.

 

Just use the unlocked BIOS and then use your aftermarket Wifi of choice, preferably the Intel 7260 since it's AC and only 30$.

 

Keep in mind that unlocking the BIOS and flashing a modded BIOS will void warranty in case something wrong happens.

 

Reflash Stock bios (by making a backup of it, which is in the tutorial by svl7) before resending it.

 

i managed to flash the bios and change the wifi card too from instructions in How To Remove Bios WLAN Whitelist From Lenovo Y410P/Y510P? | The Cosmosphere
looks like someone reblogged “svl7″'s post with details