Howto install the driver for dell wireless 5505 mobile broadband card on a dell e-series notebook with windows 7?

Question

Where can I find the windows 7 driver for my dell wireless 5505 mobile broadband Express card? This one is simple. Go to the dell website and download the driver.

How do I install the driver on an dell e-series (Latitude E6400, 6410, 6420, 6430, E 6500, 6510, 6520, 6530, ...) laptop? It's not possible, because the installation fails showing the error "No a Dell compatible system" Why is that so? Probably the dell mobile broadband cards like dell 5500, Dell 5505, Dell 5510, Dell 5520 are made for DELL's D-Series products. In my case the card comes from a Dell Latitude D820 and is now installed in an Latitude E6520.

I found, that there are some people using this card on D-series laptops with windows 7. So, the OS isn't the problem. The card itself is generally compatible with the chipset etc. But, How can I istall that driver?

Answer 1

After some web searching and try-and-error research I found that the driver installs fine in the following way:

1. Download the newest official driver from the Dell website. Now and in my case, this is the http://downloads.dell.com/comm/R164067.EXE for the DELL Wireless 5505 Vodafone Mobile Broadband 3G HSDPA MiniCard and DELL Wireless 5520 Vodafone Mobile Broadband (3G HSDPA) MiniCard which officially supports the DELL Latitude D820 (and D620) and Windows XP and Vista.
2. Extract the self-extracting archive. By default, it extracts to C:\dell\drivers\R164067
3. Download UniExtract from http://www.legroom.net/software/uniextract if you don't have it yet.
4. The folder you extracted the files to (see 2.) now contains a file named 'setup.exe' (or 'setup' if you don't diplay the file extensions). Extract this file using uniextract preferably to a subfolder (named 'setup' by default)
5. In this subfolder extract the file 'Dell Mobile Broadband Card Utility.msi' using uniextract preferably to another subfolder (named 'Dell Mobile Broadband Card Utility' by default)
6. In the new subfolder Extract the file 'Data1.cab.cab' using uniextract preferably to another subfolder (named 'Data1.cab' by default)
7. Unfortunately, uniextract doesn't recover the file names and file extensions correctly, that's why, in the newest subfolder ('Data.cab') you will find a lot of files with crytic file extensions e.g. '.5F1DC02E_0598_4666_8B42_4C5AA41526BB' with the original file extension before this string e.g. 'nwvndis**.sys**.5F1DC02E_0598_4666_8B42_4C5AA41526BB'

Now, for all files having an original file extension of - .inf - .cat - .sys - .dll

rename the file and remove the cryptic file extension so that original file extension is left.

e.g. 'nwvndis.sys.5F1DC02E_0598_4666_8B42_4C5AA41526BB' >is renamed to> 'nwvndis.sys'

While doing this, you can ignore files with an original file extension of .sys1. .cat1, .cat2 etc.

That's it - You can now install the driver by pointing to the data folder using the device manager. After this, the driver works fine.

!! Use these instructions at you own risk - There's no guarantee that they will work with your system configuration !!