Dell on Remko's Blog

Installing Dell Wireless 5530 HSPA Mini PC #2

Sun, 13 Nov 2011 20:20:51 +0000

In a Comment on my Article "Installing Dell Wireless 5530 HSPA Mini PCI", Florian asked how to Install Dell's R298998 driver on non authorized system and card combinations.

I decided to have a look and downloaded this driver. The structure isn't much different from the R251153 driver I described in my earlier post.

When installing it on a non authorized card/laptop combination the error is similar:

When the error message appeared I looked into the temp folder and I noticed that just like before 2 folders were created (with a GUID as name). One of these folders contained the file driver_auth.exe which, as I already knew, performs the actual validation.

Switch SATA Operation Mode

Sat, 18 Jun 2011 21:38:19 +0000

Modern systems usually offer different SATA Operation Modes such as ATA, AHCI or IRRT.

The AHCI mode offers extra features such as hot swapping and native command queuing.

Many vendors set the SATA Operation Mode to ATA by default because it’s the most compatible mode but there are a few reasons why you might want to change it:

AHCI has a higher performance than ATA.
AHCI is a requirement for the TRIM command.
AHCI is required for self encrypting hard drives

Please note that the IRRT (integrated raid) mode is supposed to support all functionality of AHCI but in my experience it doesn't.

So the question is: how do we switch the SATA Operation Mode from ATA or IRRT to AHCI?

Installing Dell Wireless 5530 HSPA Mini PCI

Fri, 27 May 2011 17:40:14 +0000

EDIT: See my followup article to learn how to reverse driver_auth.exe, decrypt and encrypt dell_wwan_sysID.dat.

I bought a Dell Wireless 5530 HSPA Mini PCI card for my Dell Precision M4500 laptop.

This is a small expansion card that works together with the built in SIM card slot that is present in most Dell (Business) laptops.

This SIM card slot is usually located near the battery compartment:

The card was installed in a few minutes since the antenna cables were present already and on my laptop I only needed to remove the backcover with just one screw.

Then I wanted to install the required software but this card is not officially supported in the M4500 (I bought this card because it was much cheaper on ebay).

So I took the driver from the M4400/Latitude E range, labeled R251153 but I got this error message when installing: