Although this was not addressed to me, I would like to make a couple of points.
None of us should be flaming each other or vendors. These forums are here so users (customers) of these products can help each other solve problems. I have never worked for Intel and have no reason to support them or to criticize them. AFAIK, the only Intel employee who posts here is "Joe Intel". Their products have generally worked fine for me and I only experienced a small problem with this card that another user here helped me fix very quickly. So to answer some of your questions:
1. The .01% number is a swag since only Intel would know the real number and companies just don't publish those types of numbers. However, sales for a card like this can easily run in the hundreds of thousands so considering the number of huge OEM deals on this (Dell, Lenovo, etc.) let's say that they sold a minimum of 300,000 (this number may be available somewhere). That means that a 1% failure rate would be 3000 customers with cards they have not been able to get working after 1 or 2 support calls (which doesn't people like me). Since the laptop vendors sell a very large percentage of these cards this would mean a company like Dell could have 1000 really mad customers or at least several hundred. We would be hearing a lot more if this was the case. It's more likely that they have 1/10th that number and have come up with some other solution for many of them. I mentioned in an earlier post that my company has deployed several hundred Lenovo laptops with 7260 cards and when I asked the IT department about it they said they have not had a single problem with these cards. If Intel was running a 1% failure rate we probably would have had 1-3 failed cards so in our case 0.1% is more likely.
2. I'm not sure why you think there are no AC or N config settings since there certainly are. If you go to the properties dialog for the card and click the "Advanced" tab you will see them. They are not obvious so you may need to look up settings such as "HT Mode" to see what they do
3. It's very possible that you have a completely failed card. I don't follow this forum closely now but have you called support at your laptop vendor or Intel to see if they will replace your card to see if it solves the problem? You will likely have much better results with support if your card is truly failed than you will have here talking to other customers.
Good luck!
D
