Dell 5540 Mobile Broadband Windows 8 driver?

Hi,

Unfortunately, there is no Windows 8 driver for Dell 5540 mobile broadband HSPA card available as of now. RTM'd is still being tested in the market. I will update you once it’s officially released.

Any news on this?

Hi, Please update us - Win8 is now officially out, and this is a stopper for our adoption. Let us know, Andrew

I have a Latitude E6510 equipped with the same Dell 5540 Adapter. I installed the Windows 7 Driver (along with the Dell Broadband Utility). It installed OK, and is working up to a point. You can only connect using the Dell Broadband Utility, Windows 8 does not recognise the Network Adapter as a Wireless Adapter and so it does not display any signal strength or allow you to connect it using windows. I find this very frustrating.

Come on Dell, get you act together, why are there no Beta drivers available? Windows 8 has been around for a while now (Beta, RC and RTM). Why have dell not made their drivers available for testing at the same time?

I found the solution to this one - at least for our Vostro 3300: we uninstall the package that was within the image, and we install this package: www.dell.com/.../vostro-3300, and it works without the app.

I uninstalled the drivers and the Dell broadband utility from my machine (Latitude E6510) and I attempted to install the package suggested by alipka but it would not install.

I then found a driver on my own machine (from when I was running Windows 7) I installed this, it installed and did not install the Dell Broadband Utility. It now works correctly with Windows 8. It now allows me to connect/disconnect using windows 8 and it can be set as a Metered connection! Ideal really. Now I can easily see the  Signal strength etc. At last! Why I did not try this driver earlier I do not know.

Note to self, Don't play with 3G drivers when on a Train with no other way of connecting to the net! Luckily I already had the drivers on my machine.

The Drivers' version.txt contained:

Title      : Communications:Dell Wireless 5540 HSPA Mini Card Driver

Version    : A29

OEM Name   : Dell

OEM Ver    : R2AA06

Computers  : Latitude - E4200, E6510, E6410, E4310, E6410 ATG, E5410, 2110

Oses       : Windows 7 32-bit Professional, Windows 7 32-bit Starter, Windows 7 32-bit Ultimate, Windows 7 64-bit Professional, Windows 7 64-bit Ultimate, Windows Vista 32-bit Business, Windows Vista 32-bit UltimateWindows Vista 64-bit BusinessWindows Vista 64-bit UltimateWindows XP ProfessionalWindows XP Professional 64-bit (IA64)Windows XP x64 Professional Client

Languages  : Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese-S, Chinese-T, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Iberian Portuguese, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Swedish

Created    : Mon Nov 29 04:52:58 CST 2010

and were in a folder called R283078. They seem to work ok, but we shall see! Although now there is no control provided by the Dell Broadband App. I don't want to install it in case it messes up the Windows 8 integration.

Great - unfortunately this solution didn't work for me. I downloaded R283078 from the dell site but all it unzips is a Setup.exe which fails to run (it says "Authentication Failed. The Dell Wireless HSPA Mini-Card Drivers cannot be installed on this computer. Please contact the Dell support for further information").

I am currently dual booting Win7 and Win8 but cannot find the installed win7 drivers - I did a search for that folder "R283078" but only found the one I recently downloaded rather than an existing win7 version.

This is the same error I received when installing the Vostro driver. Perhaps you need to find the Windows 7 driver for your XPS which does not have the Dell Mobile broadband built in.

Fab thanks for the inspiration - I finally got it working.

1. In Windows 8 - find "device manager" (WIN-W and type device manager)

2. Find the Dell HSPA device with the yellow exclamation mark, got into properties and click update driver

3. Browse the pc for driver and pointed it at my old windows 7 "Windows" directory (might be Windows.old if you upgraded).

This then located the driver and installed successfully - I think I rebooted - but then about 5 other unknown Dell mobile broadband devices appeared in device manager (GPS etc.) so I repeated steps 2 and 3 till all had been successfully installed.

Thanks all (except Dell for not helping :-P)

Please see my blog post about this. I have extracted and uploaded the raw drivers from the original installation package and posted instructions on how to get these drivers working. I did not keep my Windows 7 installation so could not do it the way you guys did.

See my post here:

http://baskura.com/post/34828824132/dell-5540-mobile-broadband-driver-for-windows-8

Here the link to download to driver to start your above mentioned installation...

www.dell.com/.../vostro-3300

Thanks to this Gentleman for the link and it worked. The thing is it won't work straight as most of the dell drivers work. This is how you will have to do it...it should work as it did for me....

1. Firstly download the driver from the link in the original post and then extract it. The file will extract in C:/Dell/Drivers/R253451 (you can copy this address)

2. Go to Device Manager ...Right Click on My Computer (Computer) and click on properties

3. On top LEFT corner it says DEVICE MANAGER...click on this

4. New window will open which is called the DEVICE MANAGER. You should see your HSPA 5540 with a Yellow Triangle on it or under Network Adapters.

5. Doulble click on the HSPA 5540. This will open the drivers window for HSPA 5540, in this window you should see UPDATE DRIVER, click on it.

6. New windows will open which will have two options a. Search Automatically... & b. Browse My computer for Driver Software.

7. You have to click on the b. Browse My Computer for Driver Software. Now browse for the location c:/dell/drivers/R253451 and click OK. Your driver will now install. 

In my case after installation it gave me more items with YELLOW TRIANGLE, I just browsed to same location to install those as well. 

Good Luck!!!