This time round, my cross-hairs are trained firmly at the heart of the behemoth Intel. As one or two of my previous posts will affirm, I'm a huge fan of Intel's wireless cards. After years (literally) of suffering at the hands of Atheros cards in general, and the Linux-driver developers in particular, along came Intel - or rather, I bought an Intel card! - and all was well with the world again, at least the bits that had to do with my computer experience anyway!
Apart from a slight hiccup with my first Intel IWL3945 wireless card, which came bundled with my now long-in-the-tooth Dell XPS M1210 laptop, the performance of the new(er) Intel 5100 card has been close to exemplary - no drama, no fuss, it just works! This I presumed was a result of Intel wretching from the hands of Linux developers, all thoughts of writing their own drivers, and supplying them with a 'binary-blob', that could be packaged in a software 'wrapper' for Linux OS's, but nothing else - Intel took sole responsibility for the cards operation. This policy seemed to work. Then along came the 7260...
More specifically, the card I bought is a N-7260HMW. I bought two cards actually - one an Intel, and to cover all bases, the other was a Broadcom. Both were half-length, single-channel, and included Bluetooth 4.0. But let's just stick with our little Intel saga for the moment.
Out of the gate, I had problems with the 7260. The wireless performed perfectly, it was the bluetooth that gave me headaches. From the get-go, I was using it in the Dell laptop, so that I could enjoy the great sound of my M-Pow bluetooth headset to the fullest. Prior to the 7260, I was using the ancient bundled Broadcom bluetooth, that would disconnect after 15 minutes - so regular was it in fact, that you could almost set your watch by it! The 7260's main problem was getting its bluetooth to start at boot-up. It either started or it didn't, the latter occurring about 50% of the time. The only recourse then was to reboot and try again, at least initially. I later discovered that merely Suspending and restarting would do the trick as well. But either way, it often took several tries before Bluetooth would initialise. Once started, 'pairing' proved somewhat of a chore with the M-Pow, but I'm inclined to believe that this has more to do with them, than with Intel's offering. Though once 'paired', everything was rosy, you could listen via Bluetooth for hours on end.
I noticed one curious thing however. The laptop has two pci-e slots, labeled 'WLAN' and 'WWAN'. Up till now, I had always figured that they were electrically identical. Introducing the 7260 to the WLAN-slot however results in no bluetooth whatsoever, whereas it worked in the WWAN slot - so something is different! That got me curious about how the card would perform in other motherboards, and that was when the shit really hit the fan.
I have two ITX pc's, one a 7 year old Zotac with an integrated quad-core Atom CPU, the other a just-bought ASrock mobo, which takes an AMD Athlon 5350 processor. Given that the Asrock is a Zotac replacement, it's maybe truer to say that I have just the one ITX-pc, but both motherboards were tested as follows, and with identical results.
With the 7260 in the Asrock mobo, and Deepin Linux fired up, Bluetooth starts but is unusable. After hours & hours of fcuking about, the only way I could get the M-pow headset to pair with the 7260 was from the terminal. Once paired & connected, the connection was solid, as was the sound-quality. But try as I might, I could not repeat the pairing, even from the terminal - clearly, the 7260 was not going to be usable on the ITX powered by Linux. As I had a barely-used installation of Windows 7 on the same SSD, I thought I'd give it a shot, just to see the level of service the 7260 should be capable of delivering. Only to recieve the biggest shock of all...
Go to Intel's web-site, you will find that there is no shortage of drivers available for downloading, so finding appropriate drivers took mere minutes. The following hours & days were consumed by trying to find ANY DRIVER that worked! There were none - I couldn't believe it!!!!! I mean, this is INTEL!!! They have either a flawed hardware version (7260) out there, or else they are incapable of fixing the 'Bluetooth problem'. And yes, had I searched beforehand, I would have found dozens & dozens of people complaining about the exact same problem. But I repeat, this is INTEL! How incompetent must they be, that after 4+ years they are incapable of fixing a problem like this, and for Windows no less! - remember, this card first same out in 2012?!?!?!? And the problem seems to also be effecting the newer generation 7260's as well, the 7260-AC's for instance.
To reiterate, with Window's System 7, the 7260's Bluetooth doesn't work - PERIOD! That to me is incredible! With Linux Mint, and Intel's binary-blob driver, the failure to start problem excepted, Bluetooth performs incredibly well. 99 times out of 100, it is the opposite, Linux users always seeming to get the thin end of the wedge. Granted, Bluetooth is almost unusable with Deepin Linux, so maybe I got lucky with Mint. I even downloaded a Linux-lite (AntiX, 590megs) live-CD to test this conjecture, and admit that I could not get Bluetooth to work on that either, although wireless worked perfectly. Intriguingly, I also tried the 7260 with a relatively ancient Ubuntu 12.04 live-CD, and was surprised to find that now its Bluetooth worked perfectly, although I had no wireless, due to a 7260 driver not being available back then. So, a mixed, but generally positive performance where Linux is concerned, whereas Intel can't even get its own hardware working with Windows 7. Shame on you Intel.
But there was always my fall-back, the Broadcom 4314. Curious thing about this card was that it was not even detected when inserted, in any of my computers! After countless more hours trying to coax this thing to life, I finally admitted defeat, but out of curiosity, lifted the soldered-on RF-shielding to see if I could see anything amiss. Sure enough, the main Broadcom chip had a little blackened 'volcano' rising from it near its centre - the chip had been fried! This was sold as a new item, so it just goes to show that some Chinese Sellers (Ebay) will sell you anything.
Right now, I'm again on the lookout for another half-length wireless card, the only type that will fit in the Asrock motherboard. Given my experience with the 7260, one thing I'm sure about is that it will not be an Intel!
Edit: Seems like the wireless component of this card is flaky as well. Since posting this, I've had multiple instances of the 7260-wireless just switching off, the only recourse left being to reboot the computer. Unsurprisingly, 7260-Bluetooth also takes the unscheduled hiatus or two as well. So yeah, the 7260 is a confirmed POS on all accounts it seems. I've ordered a couple of Broadcom half-length pci-e wireless/bluetooth cards which hopefully will perform better, and allow me to jetison this turd. Only reason I'm still using it is for the bluetooth. I'm back to using the full-length Intel 5100 card for wireless.
Edit1: I bit the bullet and re-ordered the Broadcom 4314 wireless card. I had definite deja-vu pangs after installing it on my laptop running Linux Mint. Wireless worked, Bluetooth was detected & enabled, but its resolutely refused to even detect any other bluetooth device, let alone pair with it. Same with Linux Deepin. As a last resort, I gave it a go on Windows 7. After several hours of searching, I eventually managed to find drivers that worked. Had I just downloaded the first driver I had come across, I would have saved myself a lot of time. This was (to me) an astronomical 237meg in size, which I presumed contained drivers for all of the Windows platforms, so spent ages downloading smaller files - none of which worked properly. Turns out the wireless driver is about 30meg, whereas the Bluetooth driver is a huge 220megs - both of which I eventually found & installed seperately, but it would have been so much easier to have downloaded the large 237meg package.
Even with the Bluetooth driver installed, Window's Device Manager happy that everything was working properly and my Mpow headset successfully paired, Bluetooth still wouldn't work! The problem was that there was no Bluetooth option being added to Window's 'Audio devices'. After another hour of messing about, as a last resort I got Windows to 'Troubleshoot' Bluetooth, and was surprised when it found a missing Bluetooth driver, something Device Manager hadn't flagged. Once this was installed, Bluetooth worked wonderfully! As I type this, I am listening to crystal-clear Bluetooth audio on the Mpow from another room while typing this on the laptop, the Windows 7 PC streaming the audio while also re-coding a large HEVC movie with Handbrake. :)
So, yeah, a thumbs-up for the Broadcom card (specifically a BCM943142A0) on Windows 7, it's just a shame that Bluetooth doesn't seem to work at all on Linux. I guess I'll have to go back to using the Intel 7260 in the laptop - though imo, the Intel 7260 still sucks!
