UPGRADING YOUR DELL D420

I have given up on using my Dell D420, courtesy of the university. It is because of the slow hard disk, which is a 1.8 inch 4200rpm model. But I am sure, most of you are still using it as your primary computer. I have been opening up the compartments in the D420 since I found a SIM card slot under the battery. After reading and searching a few forums, I found out that the available WWAN slot in Dell D420 is actually active and you can just put a mini PCI WWAN card in it and then put a 3G SIM card in the SIM card slot under the battery to make it work. Dell has also provided two antennaes within it.

With this knowledge, I proceed to look for a cheap 3G WWAN card in ebay. You couldn't find any in lelong. The cheapest 3G WWAN card I could find is the Sierra MC8775 model. Most sellers are from Hong Kong, with a price of less than RM150. Much cheaper than a USB 3G modem sold by Celcom sellers, which are usually priced at RM199. A seller is selling at around RM130 in ebay malaysia.


I bought from another seller. The card is just another mini PCI type card. To install, you can read or follow the manual from Dell.


Just unscrew the three screws under the laptop. But before that, make sure you remove the battery first. Then plug in the antennae into the WWAN card. There are two antennae available. One is grey/white and the other is black/white. Plug in the grey/white antennae into the available port in the card marked as MAIN. Leave the black/white antennae alone. Then plug in the Sierra MC8775 card into the available WWAN PCI slot next to the PCI WLAN card. Then put in your unlimited package 3G SIM card in the slot under the battery. Put in the battery back in the slot.


Switch on the laptop. For sure, your laptop won't be recognising the WWAN card due to the nonavailabilty of drivers. Just download the driver and installer from sierrawireless. Install the software and wait for the laptop to recognise the WWAN card. Then start the Sierra Watcher program. I am getting a full bar Celcom 3G signal with HSDPA in my room at 3rd floor JHC. The software supports SMS. I also found a dialer, which supposed to enable voice call from your laptop. But I have yet to try it now. This blog is typed from the Dell D420 running Windows 7 Ultimate RC, with an internal Sierra MC8785 3G WWAN on Celcom HSDPA.

Even though I am doing this on a Dell D420, I am sure it will also work perfectly with a Dell D430, which most of you are using too. This is because of a similar internal architecture and motherboard of these two Latitude laptops. There is another newer Sierra card available which is the MC8781 model. This model do support GPS, in which it support 3G and GPS in one PCI card. The added advantage of using this card, is that you can use your laptop as a GPS machine with without having to have another bluetooth or USB GPS unit. However you still need to have a GPS software installed, which I would recommend Garmin Mobile PC. This card is slightly more expensive, and since I already have a bluetooth GPS available, I don't find the need to buy a more expensive card.

This modification is so easy since you don't have to do any soldering to the motherboard. But since my primary laptop is a nearly perfect MSI McWindtosh running Leopard OSX 10.5.8, I need to find a way to have an internal 3G in it, which for sure will need a soldering of SIM slot into the motherboard.

Enjoy...