Wednesday, May 14, 2014

Install Dell Wireless 1506 without Unified Wireless Application

I just got a batch of Dell Latitude E7440's on my desk and found, much to my surprise and annoyance, that they came bundled with a wifi management application called Unified Wireless Application. Uninstalling this useless drek also unhelpfully uninstalled the driver for the wifi card! The situation is described in more detail here.

I was able to get the drivers from this package and get them installed by doing the following:
  1. Download file Network_Driver_8G8D5_WN_10.0.0.286_A02.exe from Dell
  2. Run this executable and choose Extract to dump contents to C:\temp\
  3. After uninstalling the Useless Wireless Application I opened the Device Manager and found the device in question
  4. Choose to Update Driver, then point the device manager at C:\temp\

This seems like the kind of hack that shouldn't be necessary on a brand new system, but there you have it - wifi without the annoyance.
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2 comments:

  1. UnknownFebruary 27, 2017 at 10:21 AM

    This is still a problem in 2017! I was configuring (3) Dell Latitude 3470's. All three would frequently go to 100% CPU usage. Low and behold, all of the services occupying the CPU were parts of Dell's Unified Wireless driver suite. Updating drivers and software didn't help. Removed it...no driver installed at this point. Downloaded and extracted the drivers and software, and pointed Windows to the driver only, and avoided installing the software.

    ReplyDelete
  2. UnknownJuly 30, 2017 at 9:04 PM

    Thanks! Huge Help, I had 6 3550s with crashing Unified Wireless Assistant and this worked.

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