Download hp driver intel dual band wireless-ac 8260

i never could get the intel dual band wireless-ac 8260 chipset to work reliably in several new (VERY expensive) Panasonic CF-54 laptops. my experience has lead me to believe the problem is the massive Proset bloatware, not the barebones drivers or the chipset. This is my fix for W7, but the steps are the same for W8/10:

I tried everything I could think of and many suggestions from intel and the internet as well. nothing worked. the chipset was balky in connecting if it would connect at all, and when it did connect, it was almost always REALLY, REALLY, REALLY slow! And this was the case on multiple routers, both old and new.

In complete despair, I finally decided to completely nuke the MASSIVE (and as far as I could tell, nearly useless) bloatware known as Intel Proset/Wireless and instead just install the basic Intel WiFi drivers and let Microsoft manage the WiFi (which Microsoft has almost always done flawlessly since Vista SP1) and see if that might fix the problem. It did fix the problem!

Here’s what to do:

1. Download the barebones Intel drivers specific to your OS version for the 8260 wifi chipset from here:

https://downloadcenter.intel.com/download/27206

For my Windows 7 x64 system, I downloaded WiFi_20.0.2_Driver64_Win7.zip:

https://downloadcenter.intel.com/downloads/eula/27206/Intel-PROSet-Wireless-Software-and-Drivers-for-IT-Admins?httpDown=https%3A%2F%2Fdownloadmirror.intel.com%2F27206%2Fa08%2FWiFi_20.0.2_Driver64_Win7.zip

2. Unzip the downloaded driver file into its own folder, but don’t do anything else with it yet.

3. Go to Programs and Features in Control Panel and Uninstall the installed Intel Proset/Wirless software. Remove everything, including “settings”.

4. Next, manually delete the two intel wifi driver files from Windows/system32/drivers, namely netwfw02.sys and netwfw02.dat OR netwfw04.sys and netwfw04.dat (or perhaps both or even some other number besides 02 or 04). This is an important step, because uninstalling intel driver software lately does not always actually delete the old driver files, and I’ve had replacement intel driver installs silently fail because they were unable to delete and/or replace existing driver files, leaving a total mess.

(The worse case i’ve encountered is that after uninstalling the intel HD Graphics 520 display drivers, over 200 driver files are left behind that HAVE to be manually deleted AFTER uninstalling, because if they are not manually deleted, the new driver bundle will absolutely NOT install correctly leaving things like graphics acceleration completely broken.)

5. Now go back to the unzipped barebones wifi drivers folder and execute DPInst64.exe (DPInst32.exe for 32-bit systems) followed by executing iprodifx.exe.

And that should be it. Windows should popup a balloon from the taskbar telling you that a new wifi device has been installed and you should be good to go. Not only should the intel wifi now function flawlessly, but you’ve also eliminated a massive amount of unnecessary bloatware, including several background processes that run at all times, consuming both CPU and memory.