Intel 4965AGN WLAN Card and Dell Inspiron 1721

axxxo

VIP Member
I recently bought the intel 4965agn card to upgrade my current dell 1395 card which doesnt support the N wireless signal. Risky move as there is no supported driver for my Dell Inspiron 1721 to support the intel card but as it was going for a bargain price of roughly 10 euro on ebay i thought it was worth a shot especially since the seller had sold 10 previously and received good feedback from all involved.

Anyhow the fun started when i received the card, installation was easy, although this card had 3 connections rather than two connections on the previous, i ignored the 3rd connection initially as i had 4 other wires or antenna's sitting there doing nothing and i just connected the white and black antenna to positions 1 and 2 on the new intel card for the A and G signal.

The seller provided links to Intel's website leaving me to look for the driver i needed, eventually found it and installed it (actually installed it before i installed the card i should mention) and no joy, computer froze, black screen and alot of swearing :)

Managed to get into safe mode to uninstall the driver and start looking again.
Off to the Dell website this time. Found various drivers for this particular card and tried a few but all failed and same freezing, black screen and of course..swearing :)

Desperate measures were called for, i managed to track down the ten buyers which wasnt too easy may i add as the listings were private but i had the date to go by at least.
After contacting a few of them i waited for a couple of days to get some replys. One guy out of the 4 or 5 people that i got in touch with managed to get it working with the driver the seller had provided from the Intel website on an Inspiron 1525, another chap managed to get it partially working but couldnt figure out the third antenna to attach to the card and another managed to get it working but then it failed after a couple of days.

These very same people had left positive feedback, these people were my hope! I wanted to find them and just smack them around the place for being so stupid to leave positive feedback for something that didnt work for them.

The chap that i had spoken to kindly bombarded me with emails to try to help me out but with nothing i hadnt already tried.

Time to get my money back. I contacted the seller which i didnt put much fate into to be honest as they were in Hong Kong and probably just sold me a dud for a quick few quid.
They replied though and proved me wrong and offered the full refund once i posted it back. Happy Days.

I had another quick look through Dell while i was waiting for the next day to come to post the card back and saw the exact same card for sale for 76 dollars (i got mine for 10 euro) with a message at the end saying it is suporrted by technical support when used in a dell system...sweet i said, ill give them a call, their not gonna know i didnt buy it from them lol.

Of course i got a poor chap that couldnt understand my lovely irish accent and i not being able to understand him so we were making great progress lol
After him trying to convince me its a software problem after he took control of my computer, going to device manager and finding a few exclamation marks next to some bluetooth drivers from people (family) connecting their dam phones to my comp all the time and not installing properly,i dam well wanted to strangle him through my mobile.
He finally passed me to his supervisor thank god

Very nice chap, told him the story, he asked what driver/s did i try and i told him.
He said to me there is no compatible driver listed for my 1721 :quote:BUT:quote: try this out and give it a go.

He gave me a number for a driver to try out and I could not believe it but it actually worked.
Happy bloody days.
His assistant was supposed to email me to see was i happy with the service but obviously took my email and phone number down wrong so i cannot thank the supervisor. I also emailed back all the poor sods that didnt manage to get it working that i contacted through ebay to see if the driver would work for them too.

So anyway, for anyone that has a Dell Inspiron 1721 and wants to try this out, the driver can be found in the link below. After installing the driver can also be updated through device manager :)

R171435 DRIVER

The connection for the Antenna is as follows

Solid White on 1
Solid Black on 2
Solid Grey on 3

Dell Inspiron 1721 owners manual PDF
 
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