Itronix XR-1 IX270 rugged laptop bluetooth adapter

Hello,

I have a couple of these rugged laptops one I mainly use for GPS navigation while the other one is used for spare parts.

I'm looking for a bluetooth card that will work with this laptop. I've tried installing an Intel Centrino N 2230 but the XR-1 won't recognize the bluetooth or install it's bluetooth drivers.

It's currently running Windows XP Pro. for which it's OEM licensed.

It does recognize the Intel 2230's WiFi, and I'm able to connect to a WiFi AP and the Internet.

However I mainly need bluetooth for GPS and perhaps cell phone, etc. The laptop is rarely used to connect to the Internet.

I know I can install a USB bluetooth dongle however I would prefer an internal bluetooth adapter that connects to the it's built-in antenna

I'm also looking for a DVD/RW Drive for the XR-1

Anyway if any one knows for certain which bluetooth card and drivers that works with the XR-1 I would appreciate a reply.

 

@tenesu check if Bluetooth is enabled in BIOS, and tape pin 51 on your WLAN module (with thin electric tape). On side note, 2230 is ancient - 7260 AC would be a decent option - as long as you buy it from a reputable seller, since some of those cards have faulty Bluetooth.

 

Ok thanks, I'll first give taping pin(s) with the 2330 a try and then look around for a 7260, perhaps a genuine Intel 7260 from ebay?

I found a message from Intel support where people have successfully got their adapter working with both wifi and bluetooth by taping both pin 20 and 51

https://communities.intel.com/thread/51030

 

@tenesu if you decide to get 7260, make sure it is 7260 AC 802.11ac 867Mbps; some dishonest sellers try to sell 7260 N 802.11n 300Mbps card as AC, some sell early revisions of 7260 AC with faulty Bluetooth. I personally recommend this seller - his 7260 AC always worked for me; his prices are not the cheapest on this item, but you can make an offer. Good luck!

 

Thanks for the link.

However there may one problem I'm unable to find any Intel drivers for the 7260 which apparently there are two versions? I have found a 1x1 and a 2x2 version?

Anyway I don't believe there are any XP or Vista drivers which has become more common with developers of newer hardware architectures, many only support Windows 7 and higher.

 

@tenesu 7260 can only be 2x2. There are many versions - 7260 802.11n minipcie, 7260 802.11ac minipcie ( you need this one), 7260 802.11n m.2, 7260 802.11ac m.2. Some dishonest sellers advertise 3160 as 7260 - while a 1x1 802.11ac 433Mbps card of same family it doesn't have the right to be called 7260 by any means.

Windows 7 drivers should work for Vista. Are you using XP/Vista for some particular reason? It may indeed be wiser to stick with 2230 in your circumstances.

 

Intel drivers are fairly specific to the OS they're written for. Software developers have pretty much separated XP and Vista Drivers from Windows 7 and higher. Even if the driver(s) exe file installation program is described to be compatible for Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 10. The installation program often will install separate driver(s) for Vista.

Vista and XP are considered obsolete Operating Systems and often there are no drivers for them . If XP and Vista are supported the developers often will have separate exe or zip files driver installation files.

The laptop I have installed the current Intel 2230 is an Itronix XR-1 (rugged laptop) which has older UN-upgradeable hardware architecture that came out back in the days when XP and Vista first came onto the market. IIRC the XR-1 debuted around ~2007. It's used primarily for GPS road navigation which works great under XP. I suppose Windows 7 or Windows 8 could be installed at an additional cost, but would run slower because of the min. system requirement of Windows 7 and Windows 8.

It probably would be easier to upgrade to a newer rugged laptop with Windows 7, 8 or 10 already installed. However XP runs just fine with fewer potential problems than Windows 7, 8 and 10. The more feature one installs into an OS creates more potential problems running the OS.

I owned various PCs and laptops for over 35 years, however my current PC's and laptops most are have older architectures up to around 10 years past. I haven't upgraded lately as I really don't require all the features of a newer OS.

Newer PCs and Laptop running later versions of Windows require more memory and cpu speed to accommodate all the newer features including security.

However to run only a few applications and not requiring newer features the older PC's and Laptop normally run just fine. Though I notice more recent software development for the web (Internet) seems to require more memory and cpu power as they keep adding more and more features with more and more advertising. One problem with modern web design is memory and cpu time is wasted on running unnecessary video for advertising and scripts that often are not needed or don't work correctly. Ebay is one example I started using ebay back in the 90s and it was fairly simple. The current eBay website relies heavily on scription which most of the time freeze the PC and cause other problems. There scripting also crashes the ebay webpages.

All together modern day Internet web design often prevents many of the older pc's from web surfing and/or slow web surfing to a crawl. Prevents people from posting messages onto forums, etc. Their web designs are basically memory and cpu time hogs. using background and foreground scripts, videos, etc. that start running while your trying e.g. to post a message, read an article, etc. imo, it's totally ridiculous and goes against the purposes original pc were designed and invented in the first place.

 

@tenesu I had all Windows versions running on machines of the era. 8.1 runs best, 10 is not far away but provides much more refined, modern experience - while 7 is noticeably slower than both in all but games - e.g. programs launch slower, boot times are worse especially on HDDs. Vista is just outright sluggish compared to any other OS, and XP... I am sure you are well aware of its limitations. On side note, genuine Windows Pro license, be it 7 or 10, costs less than $5; 8.1 Pro is more expensive.

You can completely disable advertising easily on any modern browser. The fact that XP will not allow you to install modern browser with necessary extensions is the culprit here - but hey, it is unsafe to use it for browsing anyway. CPU performance and memory demands actually did not move forward much for the past 10 years. Yes, some low-end or midrange config of old simply won't do, so unless the machine was top of the line back then - one has to get his hands dirty, add some RAM (for a total of 2GB at the very least) and probably a better CPU - but compare that to the times when computers became useless obsolete junk after 3 years or so back in the 1990ies. SSD was the major game-changer in the recent years - even handicapped by ancient SATA1 controller, or worse IDE - it still makes a tremendous difference, old machine with SSD being snappier in many tasks than new low-end one with HDD.

Bottom line - you definitely can make an (upgradeable) old machine as good as new low-end, performance-wise - if you want. It won't even cost you much in terms of money - here's an example of maxed out machine from 2006. However, sourcing parts, reassembling the machine, sorting out driver issues - it all takes time, a much more precious commodity. So, good luck taping that 2230 - and if it doesn't help, there's always a Bluetooth 4.0 dongle.

 

My Vista x64 PC with 4 GIGS memory uses a Firefox 52.5.0 browser and it's still bogs down from eBay and other sites scripting and advertising. Vista is an older OS and may contribute to some of the slowness, but my point is the web development is targeted toward modern PCs running Windows 10 and 8 which is nearly the same as 10 only running a different Desktop Windows Manager.

Sure you can increase the speed of an older PC by installing a SDD drive but it may be more beneficial and less costly in the long run to just upgrade to a more modern PC using a later cpu and other hardware architectures that control the PCI buses, video, etc. running a later version of Windows that's still supported.

The point I'm trying to make is modern browsers such as FireFox and others are abandoning or have completely abandoned windows XP and Vista. The software developers for websites often don't consider XP and Vista as a viable os, there development is mainly for Windows 7, 8 & 10 users running under more modern hardware architectures, which in part Windows development is based on. Sure Windows 8 and 10 may be able to run under min. memory and cpu hardware requirement, but Windows min. requirements leave out much of what's actually requires to run normal or well enough and not perform like a slug trying to cross a road .

Windows 7 currently has extended support until Jan 14th 2020, and according to one market share analysys from April 2017 is at 48 % of users worldwide. However since 04 of 2017 the percentages probably have changed

Windows 7 - 48 %
Windows 10 - 25 %
Windows XP - 7 %
Windows 8.1 - 6.9 %
Other - 6 %
Mac OS Sierra - 3 %
Linux - 2 %

Back in Feb. 2017 Windows 10 passed a 25% market share and Vista dropped below 1%

This means Windows 7 -through 10 have at least 79.9 percent of the market share which tech businesses pay attention to when spending money on program development including development for websites and the Internet.

Browsers such as Firefox will no longer supports XP or Vista. This is true with many of the other popular browsers.

Firefox version 52 will be the last complete update for Windows XP and Windows Vista. Security updates will be released, but no new features.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/end-support-windows-xp-and-vista

Lack of support of popular internet browsers changes the type of support website developers have for PC users.

Part of the problem is scripting used for website development. You can't disable the scripts or the ads. Sometime you can disable streaming players that bog down a pc while internet surfing such as Adobe Flash Player (that may be used to play video ads, etc.). However I don't know of anyway to disable scripting when accessing a particular website. Website scripting is notorious for bogging down a pc and making life difficult, when trying to perform a few simple tasks and/or gain access to information, etc.

E.g website scripting often prevents while trying to shop on sites such as ebay, Amazon (not as bad as ebay), and to access different forums, reading posts and creating one post, etc. Really simple tasks are sometimes made impossible due to how the website is developed with new features, etc.

 

Yes you can. Most efficient way to disable ads, especially for old&slow machines, is a (regularly updated) custom hosts file. I personally rely on uBlock Origin browser addon for blocking ads in browser only, since no other apps I use have any - and also use NoScript browser addon so that only scripts I personally whitelisted run in my browser.

Running Windows XP with less than 1GB RAM (official minimum RAM requirement for newer Windows OS, though x86 can run with as low as 256MB RAM with some tinkering) in the modern day and age, even if you use lightweight browser with all the fancy stuff disabled like Dillo, won't be any better experience.

@tenesu bottom line upgrading such an old machine is indeed a bad idea - but the problems you mention are solved easily on any machine, be it old or new. Unless you learn how to solve them, one way or another - your experience won't be pleasant even on a new machine. Almost any computer gets bogged down by insane amounts of ads and poorly written scripts - unless you block them.

 

I've installed ad blocker but for some reason they wouldn't always block some of those little ads on various forum websites. I have in the past edited the host file to reject certain servers. However since I've re-installed the OS a few times I forgot to save a copy of the host file and just forgot about it.

Websites such as ebay and others often take information and connect to other websites in the backgound. I'm not certain if there is a program that could monitor a website and provide a url list. To keep a particular website running well and to prevent running scripts and making connections to other websites and urls may be difficult and time consuming.

One other problem I come across when web surfing under Vista x64 is everything starts to bog down because the latest version of Firefox 52 starts to hog memory requiring more than a gig memory. So I need to shut down firefox, clean and reduce the PC's memory using a memory cleaner the restart FireFox. You then can pull up a past history and select which urls you want to load.

I'm uncertain if Windows 7, 8 and 10 have this same type of problem running on more recent pc architecture.

I first started using a PC back in 1981 and eventually purchased my own 8 bit computer running CP/M 2.2 with 64k memory and a 4mhz Z80 cpu.

Early pc's in many ways were faster than many modern GUI PCs as there was no graphics overhead. Back in those days computers was sorta in the dark ages as much of the general population often thought about computers the same as they thought about astrology.

Computers were at one time often considered to be esoteric and different from other things in mainstream society.

However I new people who owned and/or used computers, some were business owners while other worked as scientists, a few worked for Microsoft, etc.

I belonged to a computer club where we would meet a few times each month to talk over using, repairing and upgrading PC's.

Anyway since purchasing my first PC back in the early 80s I've been upgrading PC's ever since. Back in those days Microsoft a new startup was worth around ~$50,000.00 and trying to get a contract with IBM.

Started connecting to the Internet or Intranet approx. the same time and had dialup account using a 150 baud modem that connected to a VAX mainframe, that was connected to the Intranet. In comparison to todays Internet consisted of few people and organizations worldwide.

 

Not all ad-blockers are equal, and sometimes a few ads still slip through - but decent ad-blocker will allow you to block it with ease. Still, if you use an old machine (or smartphone) - hosts file is a much better option, though ad-blocker is still required because even regularly updated hosts isn't omnipotent.

It is inefficient to do it yourself, especially when there are more or less automated solutions for hosts file management, e.g. this.

I assume it is the problem on your 4GB RAM machine, and you have HDD-only storage. What about total memory usage at those moments? It may be due to FF paging heavily to slow storage; you could try disabling pagefile completely and it will run much faster - but you will have to watch out not to run out of memory, and close something when a notification appears at >80% memory usage.

It depends on hardware and settings. While newer OS will run faster and use a bit less memory than resource-hogging Vista, if you have HDD as OS&programs drive the whole system will be bottlenecked by it, regardless of age. Again, it's not really a question of architecture - decade-old dual-core CPUs are generally on par with modern Atom/Celeron stuff, some even faster.

Try NoScript Security Suite - does exactly that. Might be frustrating at times, but once you figure which scripts can be allowed just make the permissions permanent and it won't be your headache anymore. With eBay in particular, the only problem I have is uploading photos when creating a listing - not sure what exactly is causing it, though; old image uploader worked perfectly.

 

Ok I have downloaded the zip file and ran the batch program to change the host file and then changed the DNS service to manual then restarted.

However when I went to the link to install NoScript Security Suite

A popup message is displayed

This add-on requires a newer version of Firefox (at least version 57.0). You are using Firefox 52.0.

With a link to update Firefox, to version 52.5.0esr

ESR = Extended Support Release

I'm currently running 52.5.0 (32-bit) I did find a site where you can download other versions and languages of FireFox.

https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/

When I attempted to install Firfox 57.1 and 57.0 I receive an error message that this version of Firefox can only be installed on Windows 7 and later.

Along with a link to a webpage that has the system requirements of FireFox version 57.1

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/57.0.1/system-requirements/

Update:

I was able to install an older version of NoScript from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/noscript/versions/

Version 5.1.7 Released Nov. 17, 2017 758.9 KiB Works with Firefox 45.0 - 56.*, SeaMonkey 2.42 - *