Great new (old) laptop

[blacklion1725]

Not sure Dave – My M2 is the backup drive at the moment – although thinking about it booting would be nice, keep the system image on the big SSD (so other way round to what I have now). Will see if I can find out.

[blacklion1725]

I’ll try and have a proper play at the weekend but looks promising. Just rebooted it ad in the BIOS advanced settings there is a specific option for “Enable M2 SSD Boot” – my BIOS (on the machine when I bought it) is:

L71 ver 01.44 (12/04/2018)

In my case wondering if the M2 drive I bought would be an improvemet (read/write wise) over the Samsung Evo 860 “normal” SSD – possibly not.

Incidently – with the WWAN installed (it found a driver online) I disabled WiFi and both Three and Vodafone popped in tolife with zero config. I think there are 4G versions of the WWAN card, but they are much more expensive and I think they don’t cover all UK 4G bands. Sitting indoors getting anout 12 down and 4 up on 3G which is fine.

[Dave Rice]

Yep, same BIOS here. That’s the other good thing about buying refurbished top of the range business kit – extended support. Not many consumer laptops of that date will be getting their Intel vulnerability fixes.

[Tippon]

blacklion1725 wrote:

Just to finish this off, when fitting an M2 SSD card (£27 for a 120GB) I noticed there’s a WWLAN port next to it. Googling I found that the slim slot is accessible when you flip the battery out. Took a punt on a seond hand WWAN card of ebay for a tenner – works lovely. Only 3G but tested with my 3 and vodafone SIMs AOK. I’ll almost certainly never need it – if I take this anywhere I’ll tether off my phone if there’s no WiFi – but for a tenner why not!

That’s a coincidence. I was going to post asking if this was to do with the SIM on my new Dell:

https://photos.google.com/photo/AF1QipOQxb3O7jA1bkICnS0dgEKjyQkTJ_0aaBF4njo

As you say though, I’ve always got my phone for tethering.

[JayCeeDee]

Broken link……….:(

[Tippon]

Sorry, I’m still used to Dropbox, and not Google Photos

 

I’m a bit confused now that I’ve looked into it though, as my wifi card (to the right of this pic) has three antenna cables, but the ac card you and Dave mention in this thread only has two. Also, the slot on the left there has two antenna cables, but it’s apparently not for wifi, WWAN, or Bluetooth. I’ve also got an msata card that would fit perfectly into the WWAN slot ? My brian’s not working 😉

[blacklion1725]

SSDs with the NGFF (I think) form factor can physically fit as they are they physically the same size with the same Edge connectors. To confuse things more loads of laptop screw are “M2” nothing to do with the SSD of the same name. I’m sure that “WWAN” slot must be for a WWAN card on account of the label and the antenna cables there. I suppose it is possible that the port is only active on certain models but since the cables are there seems unlikely.

A word of warning on whitelisting, on my Elitebook only certain WWAN cards are supported sue to whitelisting. The one I bought was sold as a HP840 G1 WWAN card. It is physically a Huawei MU736, but shows up in device manager as:

HP hs3110 HSPA+ Moble Broadband Device

So guessing it must have crippled firmware or something – would well be the case with Dell’s as well. Does your laptop have a SIM card slot?

[Tippon]

blacklion1725 wrote:

I’m sure that “WWAN” slot must be for a WWAN card on account of the label and the antenna cables there.

That’s what’s confusing though. The cables are routed away from the WWAN slot, to the 1/2 mini slot next to it. They’re going through cutouts in the laptop too, so it’s not just a case of them being moved at some point in the past.

blacklion1725 wrote:

Does your laptop have a SIM card slot?

It does, yeah, under the battery.

[blacklion1725]

Oh yeah I see those cut-outs now. I’m confused as well. On mine, the connectors for the WWAN card are smaller than the WiFi card (or felt that way, they were a b@stard to clip on!). I do wonder then whether it is a common chassis for several models and your particular one doesn’t support WWAN? Confusing what the half mini PCI slot (And the antenna wires) are for if the WiFi card is somewhere else.

[Tippon]

Here’s a better view of the slots

 

[Author]

Posts