Half Mini N replacement help

Hi everyone, thanks to all that have helped me in their posts, I have spent many hours perusing through the wealth of knowledge here.

I recently got a Inspiron 1545 (for $60 cause the dude was an idiot, thank you stupidity) and looking to do some upgrading. It currently has a Dell 1397 b/g card that I want to upgrade to N. I plan on getting a WNDR3700 soon, so the laptop has to be dual band ready. I've seen posts about Intel 5300, Broadcomm BCM94311 and Atheros 9280. All seem to be viable alternatives, but I wanted a good census.

Here's the requirements:
I am running Windows 7 Pro 64 bit. I plan on dual booting so it has to be compatible with both, and it has to be Half Mini PCIe.

I have a Inspiron 1525 now, dual booted and have been very happy with my BCM94321MC, but it isn't a Half Mini. So, does anyone know the 'equivalent' to that card in Half Mini, or would anyone recommend something different? I don't need the "cheapest", I don't mind spending a little extra for compatibility.

On a side note, I'm looking to upgrade my wife's lappy too, she has a HP DV6-1334us and I tried to put my Atheros based Mini PCIe card that came out of my 1525 in and the computer wouldn't allow it to boot because of the card. She is only running Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit. What dual band N card(s) are compatible with her HP?

Thanks to everyone for the help.

 

Unfortunately for you the best choice would be an Intel 6200 but that's not a viable option it seems.
Doesn't HP while-list Wi-Fi cards? If it does (I can never remember if it's the case) you would need one that came from HP themselves.

 

HP does whitelist cards, so it pretty much trial and error.

I think your HP model have some whitelist removed bios mod already out. So try them out. Be warned you might brick your laptop.

 

There's some HP/Atheros AR9280 cards on eBay (or at least they come up as HP when I do lspci0. I bought one a few weeks ago for $12 shipped. 802.11n, which I'm using as the radio in a home-made access point. Uses the ath9k driver under Linux which is pretty stable these days.

The Intel 5300 is quite an energy pig:

http://ils.intel-research.net/uploads/papers/80211n_power.pdf

One (big) upside of the Atheros cards (ie: ath9k-driven) is they can be put into Master mode. The Intel's can't be.

edit: here's the lspci on my Atheros AR9280:

Code:

02:00.0 Network controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR928X Wireless Network Adapter (PCI-Express) (rev 01)
        Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company Device 3041
        Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 16
        Memory at fbd00000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=64K]
        Capabilities: [40] Power Management version 2
        Capabilities: [50] MSI: Enable- Count=1/1 Maskable- 64bit-
        Capabilities: [60] Express Legacy Endpoint, MSI 00
        Capabilities: [90] MSI-X: Enable- Count=1 Masked-
        Capabilities: [100] Advanced Error Reporting
        Capabilities: [140] Virtual Channel
        Capabilities: [160] Device Serial Number 00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00
        Kernel driver in use: ath9k
        Kernel modules: ath9k

So there's a good chance this will work with the HP whitelist...

 

What do you mean for master mode?

 

Master mode (otherwise known as AP or 'infrastructure' mode) is a mode the wireless card can be placed in, to act as an access point.

I'm an engineer and I use these radios in embedded systems -- so the flexibility of the AR9280 is nice (its basically the radio that drives most of Ubiquiti's products, and you can get it in 400mW-600mW flavours!). But if you don't know what Master mode is -- don't worry....