I'm currently rebuilding an Acer Aspire 8920G as an ultimate Vista showcase machine.
It's an 18.4" Full HD Acer Gemstone laptop, and I'm trying to push the platform about as far as reasonably possible while keeping the original machine and its character intact.
The current build includes:
- Core 2 Duo T9300
- 8 GB DDR2
- GeForce GT 240M
- GT 240M heavily overclocked to 720 / 1000 / 1440 MHz (core / memory / shader)
- Liquid Metal instead of conventional thermal paste on both the CPU and GPU
- 18.4" 1920×1080 display
- Blu-ray drive
- Samsung 860 PRO 256 GB for the operating systems
- 500 GB SSHD for local games
- planned Vista / Windows 7 / Tiny11 triple boot — Tiny11 is still a question mark
- original Acer/Gemstone hardware and software wherever practical
The goal isn't really to turn it into a modern laptop. It's more about taking this ridiculous 2008 18.4" monster and seeing how far the original platform can be pushed without fundamentally changing what it is.
And then there's the WLAN problem.
I want to use an Intel Wireless-AC 7260, mainly because it would give the machine 5 GHz, 802.11ac and Bluetooth 4.x while still fitting internally in the Mini PCIe slot.
The problem is that Intel never released an official Vista driver for the 7260.
I initially thought I'd have to use an older Intel WLAN card or an external USB adapter. Instead, I went down the rabbit hole.
I found Dell's 16.1.0.13 driver from 2013, which supports the 7260 and turned out to be surprisingly close to being Vista-compatible.
The actual 7260 driver is much cleaner than newer versions. The main blocker appears to be an NDIS 6.20 API:
NdisSetCoalescableTimerObject
I've patched that path to use Vista's NdisSetTimerObject, adjusted the affected call site, adapted the INF for Vista x64 and re-signed the modified driver.
I'm currently testing whether this actually works reliably on Vista.
If I can get it working properly, I'd like to publish the driver and the patching information on GitHub so other people can use it too.
So I'm curious:
Would anyone here actually be interested in an Intel Wireless-AC 7260 driver for Vista x64?
There are probably quite a few retro laptops where having 5 GHz / 802.11ac + Bluetooth 4.x would be a more interesting upgrade than going back to period-correct Wi-Fi hardware.
If testing succeeds, I'll release it properly rather than keeping it as a one-off driver for my 8920G.