confirm or deny W541 whitelist

[WizardOfBoz]

Soooo. Does the W541 have a whitelist?
If so, is there a modded bios (like 1vyrain) to get rid of the WL?
I have an Intel Dual Band AC 7260 installed. Can I upgrade this?

Thanks, Wizard

[Screamer]

Yes, it does.

Sort of, there is one man who has a guide on that.

To an 802.11ax-capable card? Yes, and that is the Intel Wi-Fi 6 AX200 (AX200NGW). I believe it is the fastest WLAN card that you can get at the moment.

[fredduvar]

Hello everyone!
I’m a proud W540 owner and I love the machine so much that I’m upgrading it a bit.
Recently, I bought a 7260-AC wireless card, second hand, that came with the Lenovo part number matching a W541 machine that probably was dismantled.
At this point I didn’t know about the whitelist, but the laptop booted after the swap. My problem is : all network services are now disabled, I have no network icon in the bottom right screen in Windows 10, and the network section in settings is crashing every time I try to access it… The card is recognized in the devices manager, drivers are installed etc… So I put back the 7260-N card and reboot… Problem unsolved, I’m now without any network connection on it… Does someone have a solution? I give up the upgrade, I just want it to work properly again… Thank you for your time.
Fred

[RealBlackStuff]

Have you tried drivers from Intel direct, rather than from Lenovo?
(same for 7260-N and 7260-AC).

[fredduvar]

Hi!
And thank you for your quick answer!

I’ve been totally unable to find the issue. Especially regarding the fact that I’ve put back the original 7260-N wireless card, and the issue was still going. No network, no icon, windows network settings menu crashing and no other option than « plane mode » when I press Fn+F8…

But… I started my upgrades by the RAM and the hard disk drive. So, fortunately for me, I had a clone of my HDD before making the network card swap. So I put back my old HDD and… Miracle. Everything works again!

So, now I know that the issue is within the OS. The ThinkPad didn’t blocked the new network card. It let me boot the OS without any trouble, so no whitelist here. If I find the motivation later, I’ll try again and investigate deeper in this problem. Thank you again,
Regards,
Fred

[fredduvar]

I forgot : the main issue in Windows 10 was the 1068 error.

All network services were unable to start because of this, according to the system.

If ever someone have the solution to this, I’m interested in!

Fred