On Wed, 27 Sep 2006 12:20:00 -0500, Lothar Frommhold wrote:
>I have an A31p, 2653-R8U, without WiFi and wonder if there could be
>perhaps an easy installation of a WiFi mini card (or whatever it takes)
>possible? How could I find out what I really need to make the notebook
>WiFi ready? Any advise would be much appreciated!
The antenna are the issue. To get best coverage you should have two, and one should be
horizontal and the other vertical. The hitachi mini-antenna I found on ebay could be used
in very tight spaces and the seller suggests in laptops not already equipped with antenna
but the question is will they have the same signal reception/strength as a longer wire. It
appears that many new laptops without wifi cards have the antenna anyway.
There are sites that show how to open up the LCD bezel to run a antenna wire. eBay has
wire kits for $10 and under that offer a pair of 10-20 inch antennas some with metal
brackets at the end to screw down to some part of a motherboard or hinge or something in
the laptop or with nothing at the end. The wires are very thin. The connector for the mini
pci card pin-point in size. You have to have at least one.
The second issue is the mini-pci card itself. It appears from my research of the last two
days that pins 11-14 and 16 are vendor specific and can have differing requirements. This
is how some mfgrs are controlling which devices can be used in their laptops, as the cards
are cheaper in many cases than a PC Card that's inserted and with a long antenna wire
running the length of a laptop have better reception.
In the case of the Toshiba branded 2200B/G that I just got from Lewis for a Toshiba
2430-s255 laptop, asking for the Tosh OEM didn't help me, as I was hoping. I had to tape
over pin 13 (one of those vendor pins) to make the card 'turn on' no setting of the
hardware switch would activate it for me. Toshiba support wanted me to spend $35 with them
to see if they could activate it, but they wouldn't guarantee that they could. Some IBMs
have a 1308 or some other number error in the bios, but the bios can be hacked to make
non-IBM cards work.
What is the specifics for your laptop? I don't know.
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