topic Re: 7260AC HMC drivers for IT admins (Windows 8.1)? in Wireless

7260AC HMC drivers for IT admins (Windows 8.1)?

fwdin — Thu, 10 Mar 2022 14:38:21 GMT

Hi,

The driver packages in the "PROSet/Wireless Software and Drivers for IT Admins" page appear not to support the mPCIe 7260 AC HMC. A note on the page says: "This Software Release version does not include new drivers for ... Wireless 7260 Family adapters" (and the device ids in the INF file seem to agree).

Instead, it refers to the "Customer Support Options for Discontinued Intel® Wireless Products" page, which does list 7260 AC, with links to two driver pages: Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

The Wi-Fi page is not the IT admin packages, and only for Win10 (if to trust what the page says). The Bluetooth page also claims Win10 only.

So where can one find the Windows 8.1 IT admin driver packages that do support the 7260 AC HMC?

Re: 7260AC HMC drivers for IT admins (Windows 8.1)?

n_scott_pearson — Thu, 10 Mar 2022 18:53:45 GMT

Intel seems to be only supporting Windows 10 these days. I do have copies of the discrete packages (.EXEs) for Windows 7 and 8.1 if you need them. Alas, I did not think to archive the corresponding IT Admin packages... :^(

...S

Re: 7260AC HMC drivers for IT admins (Windows 8.1)?

fwdin — Thu, 10 Mar 2022 20:42:51 GMT

Thanks!

Would you mind sharing the latest for 8.1? And the separate Bluetooth package, if available.

Was hoping to avoid the full PROSet package, but for now anything is better than nothing.

Might delve into the Windows Update Catalog later...

Various pre-Win10 drivers are available, but it's haphazard. Only some hardware, only some functionality (BT but not WiFi?)... Not sure why Intel can't make downloads available plainly.

Wanting to phase out older OSes is fine, but they should at least not proactively hide the previous versions.

But still hoping for an Intel forumite might point to the right direction. I suppose the files are still in here somewhere, maybe hidden behind an ever-changing site structure, no sitemap, and Javascript to confound the Wayback Machine.

Re: 7260AC HMC drivers for IT admins (Windows 8.1)?

salter — Thu, 10 Mar 2022 21:19:31 GMT

@fwdin wrote:

Not sure why Intel can't make downloads available plainly.

They used to. Intel downloads area used to be excellent, with releases going back years and good search function. Unfortunately, they removed most of that old stuff a few years ago.

Re: 7260AC HMC drivers for IT admins (Windows 8.1)?

n_scott_pearson — Fri, 11 Mar 2022 02:03:23 GMT

I sent you a PM with download information.

...S

P.S. With the changes they made in the site layout, using the Wayback Machine is awfully difficult.

Re: 7260AC HMC drivers for IT admins (Windows 8.1)?

fwdin — Tue, 15 Mar 2022 14:11:17 GMT

If anyone needs it in the future, after some manual work similar drivers can be found on:

https://drivers.softpedia.com/get/NETWORK-CARD/INTEL/Intel-PROSet-Wireless-Driver-IT-Administrators-21-10-1-64-bit.shtml

https://drivers.softpedia.com/get/BLUETOOTH/Intel/Intel-Wireless-Bluetooth-Driver-IT-Administrators-21-10-1-for-Windows-8-1-64-bit.shtml

https://www.touslesdrivers.com/index.php?v_page=23&v_code=51619&v_langue=en

Regarding the IT admin ZIP packages vs the normal EXE packages, two or three I've checked were practically the same. The EXEs contained the same files as the ZIPs, and just first extracted them (not to %TEMP% but %WINDIR%\temp).

Unclear why Intel didn't unify it to a single package, either in a format extractable with 7zip, or with a commandline switch to only extract.