Adding wi-fi and Bluetooth to Dell OptiPlex 5090 small for factor

[dylanmitchell]

What options do we have for adding Bluetooth and wi-fi to Dell OptiPlex 5090 SFF being adapted to work from home use. Want to use Bluetooth keyboards and mice, and wi-fi home printers. Looking at adding wireless cards with Bluetooth and wi-fi vs wi-fi dongles. Do wi-fi usb dongles include Bluetooth?

 

[sfx2000]

should be able to add the internal WiFi/BT card - go to the dell support site, put in the asset tag info, and check spare parts - they should reference the wireless modules there

I don't know of any USB combo devices that have BT and WiFi on the same dongle...

 

[bbunge]

Looking at the OP-5090 manual on the Dell support site I see that this PC has a lot of possibilities. There are two M.2 slots: one for a SSD and one for WLAN. The WLAN slot is the short one and there are plenty of internal WIFI cards that should work. Doing a Google search turned up several on Amazon with dual band AX and Bluetooth. Some come with antenna which would have to be mounted to the back of the case.
I have an OP-7010 that has an added internal WIFI card with Bluetooth. I robbed the card and antenna from a larger box and have the antenna ends glued to the front plastic of the case.
May I recommend you get an M.2 SSD for the main drive and use a larger conventional drive for storage. My main desktop is an OP-7040 micro i5 with a 512 MB M.2 SSD and a 1 TB 5400 RPM laptop drive for storage. With 12 GB RAM and a quad core processor it runs WIndows 11 just fine.

 

[Tech9]

Doing a Google search turned up several on Amazon with dual band AX and Bluetooth.

OEM part from DELL is better. I don't know if this DELL has devices whitelist. Amazon part may or may not work.

My main desktop is an OP-7040... it runs WIndows 11 just fine.

You may not get updates on unsupported hardware. It works for now, but not guaranteed to continue working.

 

[Andrew LB]

Yeah, i just found out the hard way regarding hardware whitelisting on Lenovo ThinkCentre Tiny clients. Such a pain in the butt. I ended up using a programmer to dump the bios and mod it to accept the card.

 

[coxhaus]

I have used USB Bluetooth and USB wireless on some Dells. For Bluetooth I used Microsoft's Bluetooth keyboard and mouse set. I move it around to different Dell PCs. For USB wireless I bought a USB wireless device from Discount Electronics in Austin TX. They deal with lots of surplus Dells. Their business is based on buying selling surplus Dell stuff. They are the best contact for used Dell parts. And they know what works with Dells. They have been doing this for years. They have a web site.

 

[Tech9]

USB is fine. No whitelist on USB devices.