GattoNero wrote:
<<I wonder if these 7260s have some fatal flaw/incompatibility with the ubiquitous Broadcom chips that cannot be overcome with software.>>
My Lenovo with this card plays quite nicely with my Broadcom AP.
I think that it is true that the card doesn't play well with some routers, though, but I don't think that it's limited to Broadcom-based devices. More broadly speaking, I think it's Windows 8 that introduces some issues of its own.
There are settings to manage on the card, on the router, and in Windows, apart from drivers which is yet another variable. It's somewhat of a pain, especially if one isn't too familiar with how to mess with these things, but it can be made to work quite successfully. --I'm addressing Windows 7 here. I don't use 8 so I don't have confidence that the chances of success apply equally between the two OSs.
I have connected my laptop with 7260AC and another with 7260N (both Win 7s) to various APs from home (Linksys with 802.11ac Marvell chipset), school (Aruba Networks with most likely Marvell and less likely Atheros chipset), and my friends (Netgear Broadcom chipset) and none of them showed any connection, latency and speed issues with the 7260 for hours. There wasn't any change in the power options on my laptops aside from extending the time to keep the screen awake (I use the Balanced plan) with the Medium power saving on battery and Max performance while plugged in and allow to turn off is checked. Also on all APs I tested, no limited connectivity or disabled card when waking up whatsoever. I really wonder what percentage of 7260 users are having this problem on windows 7. Considering the whole world, I would guess less than 2 percent on 7, but I would say around 5% - 10% on 8, 8.1. Anyways, in software world there is essentially no fix for everyone since the drivers may work perfectly for some but not for others.