techguy001 wrote:If your laptop is an HP laptop, you will have trouble buying a new wifi modem chip from outside of HP. HP uses white lists in their BIOS to force installation of HP-only parts. You'll need to buy an HP part # from the HP store to make it work and only the ones that are listed in the manual for your unit or your laptop will fail to start. Depending on the age, you may not be able to get one. Finding a dual-band wifi card may not be too difficult but finding one that is AC level may be more difficult depending on the age and what's allowed in your manual.
In my experience with both HP and Lenovo (the two manufacturers that do this awful mPCIe whitelisting), they only ever whitelist a few options from the same era, and they never go back to add newer cards to the BIOSes of older models. So on a business machine from 2008, the whitelisted options would probably be a proprietary HP/Lenovo-branded card, Intel 5100, Intel 5300, possibly the Intel card with WiMax (5150? 5350?) and that's it. If you want an Intel 6200, let alone something AC, you're SOL.
I've ever seen some recent HPs where there are no dual-band cards listed in the maintenance and service guide. None. (Needless to say, I have not bought them - 5GHz support or easy upgradeability to 5GHz is a key requirement for all devices purchased here.)