Wi-Fi adapter compatibility

[kkhanmd]

I have a Sony L series all in one SVL241490X running windows 10 since November. The wifi has stopped working suddenly two days back. I have a feeling the card has gone bust even though the software says it ok. There is no physical Wifi button on PC or keyboard, just a wifi indicator light on top Right, which is green.
A) Looking into device manager I find that the wireless adapter is qualcomm atheros ar9485wb-eg wireless network adapter. The specifications are shown at this page
https://www.atheros-drivers.com/qualcomm-atheros-datasheets-for-AR9485.html
Basically it is a PCI- express half mini card 1.2 specification complaint. It has 56-pin LPCC.
As I said its communication interface is PCI express and and peripheral interface is GPIOs and LEDs

Can I replace it with intel 8260? However connector interface is M.2 PCIe. Here is the link
http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/wireless-products/dual-band-wireless-ac-8260-brief.html
Will it work?

B) Is it easy to open and find the wireless card in L series all in one PC SVL241490X? I found some screws labelled M3. I was going to open them Any idea how to find the wireless card? Where is it located? What screws to open?

C) Is there an obvious way that I can make the Wi-Fi work that I have overlooked? (Of course WiFi is working on multiple other devices) and I have restarted PC multiple times and hit the troubleshoot option which restarts the Adapter.

Thanks

 

[KillerBee]

Have you tried deleting the driver in Device Manager and rebooting? Windows should see it and reload the driver. Or check the Sony site to see if they have a driver for download.

You could also try freeing up some disk space and loading up a second copy of a fresh Windows install to see if it's just a software problem or maybe try a Live bootable USB Linux distro like Ubuntu.

 

[Ichinisan]

Lenovo computer with Windows 10 (I believe the OS was upgraded to Win10) and the same Qualcomm Atheros AR9485WB-EG WiFi chipset. Had problems staying connected when used with Arris Touchstone DG1670A dual-band WiFi cable modem gateway. It worked fine at other locations. This was a compatibility issue that did not affect most other wireless networks. It would repeatedly lose connection and was unable to ping the gateway (192.168.0.1), even while other devices stayed connected and worked fine.

We resolved by updating the driver software from 3.0.2.182 to 10.0.0.329

Deja vu... It reminds me of old Atheros AR5000 series chipsets that also had compatibility issues until driver software was updated. Back then, trying to download the updated driver from atheros.cz was frustrating because it would download a corrupt zip file 9 out of 10 times and it took numerous attempts to get a downloaded file that could be extracted (why doesn't the web browser know the file is incomplete?).

I found this posting that seems to describe exactly the same issue with the same chipset and a slightly older Arris model. That poster's "10.0.0.225" driver version was much newer than the "3.0.2.182" we had. I don't think user "vrn" ever tried updating the WiFi driver and instead bypassed the compatibility issue by getting another wireless router!