Samsung RV511 - Windows 10 Upgrade fun

So, I'm asked to "sort" this very nice looking Samsung RV511 laptop. I'm not entirely sure of the specs but the keyboard and screen are very nice. The laptop is running Windows 7 Home Premium. I offered to clean up the OS and take it through the free Windows 10 upgrade process. Having started the laptop up, it was clear it was heavily infected with malware and probably had a virus too. It's performance was woeful, and the three browsers (Chrome, IE and Firefox), had various hijacks. In my experience, that's fairly typical for a teenage girl's laptop and the root cause seems to be "free" emoticon packs. No doubt I could have spent some time cleaning the thing up but I decided a re-install of Windows 7 was the first order of the day. The install (Win 7 with SP1) was uneventful and within 30 minutes I had a laptop with (re)activated Windows 7 which was really flying.

Now for Windows 10. Since its release in August, I have been asked to install the Windows 10 upgrade on numerous machines (old and new). I therefore have all the various incarnations of the Windows 10 installation media on numerous USB keys. For this laptop, I slotted in the appropriate key and began the upgrade from within Windows 7. That part of the process completed successfully and the machine rebooted. It was here that things went awry. The process simply stopped on the Windows start screen. I left the machine running like that for an hour but with no apparent progress, I couldn't resist rebooting and trying again. Same problem. So I did a quick google for RV511 and Windows 10 upgrade and it appears I'm just one of many who have hit the same snag. Moreover, the issue is actually with the Broadcom WIFI card in this laptop which seems to prevent the upgrade. The specific card is the BCM94313HMGB and appears to be a dual WIFI/Bluetooth card. The solution, then, is to take the machine apart and swap the WIFI card for something else. As it happened, I'd recently been given a faulty Dell Mini 10 which needed a new motherboard. The second-hand replacement from Ebay came with a WIFI card still attached. This was also a Broadcom card BCM94312HMG. So, I followed this excellent tutorial on youtube and took the laptop apart. I swapped the WIFI card over, partially re-assembled and switched the machine on. This time the upgrade completed without any issues. Windows 10 even installed the driver for the new card. Happy days.

Some pictures:

The picture above compares the two cards (top - original equipment, bottom - from the Dell mobo)

More soon, no doubt...

D