Acer S5-371 Wifi Replacement

Dear all,

i'm a still very satisfied user of an Aspire S5-371 (Intel i5-6200U) and therefore I wanted to upgrade my wifi-connectivity. I wanted to replace the original Atheros QNFA344A by an Intel Wi-Fi 6 AX200 car and it worked - more or less. The thing is that wifi works perfectly fine and extremely fast but since I replaced the card I can't use Bluetooth any more. To exclude the possibility of an driver/software issue I tried it with both Linux (Ubuntu 20.04 - 5.4 Kernel) and Windows 10 (Ver. 2004) but had no success. I also tried an Intel Wireless AC 8265NGW with same result (Linux & Windows).

So what could the problem be and which replacement card would work for sure?

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All comments

philetus

Did you download and install the Bluetooth driver for the Bluetooth? Uninstall your old Bluetooth driver first.
https://downloadcenter.intel.com/product/189347/intel-wi-fi-6-ax200

Commodore_1995#

In addition, it can enable hidden devices to uninstall previous drivers through the device manager.

riejuhatza

Thanks for your comments but I forgot to mention that I even tried a clean install of Windows and Linux. So there were no old drivers installed and of course I downloaded the newest for Win10 (Linux Kernel 5.4 already supports this wifi chipsets)
So I can exclude a software issue.
The thing is that neither Win10 nor Linux detect an unknown device or even a Bluetooth Adapter.

Any other ideas?

riejuhatza

so guys here is the explanation for the previously mentioned problem (mail from acer support):

Thank you very much for contacting us.
We are happy to assist you in answering your questions.

An exchange of the WiFi card is only technically possible, but would practically not work.
You can only use WiFi cards which are stored with the hardware ID in the UEFI (BIOS).

The reason for this is that from Windows 8 on the airplane mode is mandatory. So Windows can deactivate the WiFi card.
This is done via the hardware ID stored in the UEFI.

If you have an unknown WiFi card in your notebook, it cannot be switched on or off.
In the worst case it could be switched off and cannot be activated or vice versa. The same applies to Bluetooth. At the factory a Wi-Fi Bluetooth combo card was used.

As a workaround, you could use an external Wi-Fi USB stick and do without the internal Wi-Fi solution in the notebook.

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