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Hardware Mod: Upgrading your Wireless Card- How To

November 7th, 2010

Hardware, Personal Rants

**This is Part 2 of the “Upgrading your Wireless Card” guide and is continued from part 1. Part 1 explains the benefits of upgrading your wireless card while part 2 is simply a How To.**

This post was delayed by about 10 months due to forgetfulness and procrastination. My apologies for the delay, though I believe many people can still benefit from this post. Over the 10 months it took me to finally write the guide, the high-resolution images I took have been deleted and I have only been able to locate thumbnails with a resolution of 360×270. These lower resolution images are still clear enough to distinguish what I am doing, so this shouldn’t be too much of an issue.

Nevertheless, the show must go on and so below you will find several images documenting the process of replacing the Wireless card in your Inspiron 1525. Other laptops, specifically other Inspirons, may have a similar method though I cannot verify this and therefore cannot ensure that this guide will suffice for any laptop other than the Inspiron 1525. Lastly, we are not responsible for any damage incurred from following this guide, though if you do manage to damage your computer from following this simple guide then you probably shouldn’t be using a computer altogether.

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The following is a picture guide, though it should be self-explanatory. If you have any questions regarding any steps, please feel free to leave a comment so that I can respond.

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About Thomas

Thomas is a self-proclaimed guru (just ask him). He enjoys long walks on the beach, running Mac OS X on his Inspiron 1525, and tweeting about nonsensical life happenings. You can follow Thomas on twitter, email him, or search the interwebs for all his personal information. Neither should be too difficult.

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20 Responses to “Hardware Mod: Upgrading your Wireless Card- How To”

  1. Jay
    December 28th, 2010 at 2:05 AM

    if i did the upgrades that you suggested which would mean id be able to use the normal kernal, wifi kexts and not have to replace IO80211Family.kext

    will i then also be able to run my dell inspiron 1525 hackintosh in 64bit mode?
    also.. i play games and as you know the dell inspiron 1525 has an integrated graphics chip – do you know the maximum RAM it will recognise and what MHZ it is also? and also lastly do you think if i upgraded that id get any increase in graphical performance? – im asking also for windows as i am dual booting snow leopard and windows 7

    • Thomas
      December 28th, 2010 at 4:28 PM

      Upgrading the wireless card wouldn’t affect which Kernel you use- that’s dependent on your processor- though you wouldn’t have to replace any Wi-Fi kexts, including IO80211Family.kext. The wireless upgrade also wouldn’t affect your ability to boot in 64-bit.

      The max RAM the Inspiron 1525 will accept, due to Chipset limitations, is 4GB (2 X 2GB) at 667MHz. Upgrading the RAM would not affect graphics performance; it would simply allow you to run more programs.

      • Jay
        January 5th, 2011 at 6:52 AM

        Ok, thanks

        also… i have some very minor issues when using my inspiron on snow leopard such as sometimes when i try to close a window using the red cross button on the left hand side of each window it wont close unless i move the window slightly then try to close it again – i know its a pretty odd problem… but is there any way to fix it or run 100% native so it would fix it? would the hardware changes we said before also change this? and fix some bugs

  2. Brandon
    December 28th, 2010 at 1:18 AM

    This might be a dumb question, but where exactly did you get the card you used for this upgrade? I googled Broadcom 94321, but came up with several different models, and I know how finicky OS X can be about hardware upgrades sometimes. Does it really matter? Anything specific I’m looking for? Thanks!

  3. Soule
    December 18th, 2010 at 7:14 AM

    Hi thomas.

    I haven’t commented here for a while.

    I’ve been wondering;

    I think that the issue with my system is it’s proccessor.
    It also has only 1 GB of Ram. (and no bluetooth, too)

    I have about 60 bucks to spare; what proccessor should I buy?

    I also need to buy a phillips screwdriver (hides face)
    Where can you buy those too?

    Thanks alot!

    • Thomas
      December 18th, 2010 at 4:48 PM

      You can buy a Philips head screwdriver at your local hardware store. As for upgrading your laptop, which processor do you currently have? It may make more sense to upgrade your RAM.

      • Soule
        December 19th, 2010 at 7:42 AM

        I have a Celeron 2.0 ghz 550.

        Runs windows seven fine though.

        I bet micro center has them, thanks for the advice.

        • Thomas
          December 19th, 2010 at 4:29 PM

          You definitely want to upgrade your processor so you can use mach_kernel. You can get the t7300, the processor I upgraded to, for ~$60 on eBay (there’s currently a Buy It Now for $59.95).

  4. Kyle
    November 15th, 2010 at 2:48 AM

    Great guide… so it looks like I can upgrade my wireless, RAM and processor all at the same time!