Replacing 2200BG with IBM a/b/g... ?

Message

byron · #1 Post by **byron** » Thu Nov 17, 2005 4:53 pm

I've had nothing but problems with my 2200bg over the past 18 months and I finally threw my hands up and convinced a tech to send me a non-intel card. He agreed to send the IBM (it says philips on the actual card) a/b/g dual-band mini-pci card. I've got it installed and the drivers loaded but it won't connect to any wireless networks... does IBM limit what wireless cards can be used on certain machines? Any idea why this will not work?

btw.. i have a 2378-FVU

EDIT: if i turn off the encryption (WPA-PSK) on my AP i can get it to connect.

#2 Post by **jdhurst** » Thu Nov 17, 2005 5:00 pm

If it works with no encryption, then the card is OK. You are in the T4x forum, so I assume it is a modern IBM card (the older ones did not do WPA). So make sure you have the latest card driver. Uninstall Access Connections, update the card drivers, then install the newest version of A/C. Should work. Also try WEP to see if it works. ... JD Hurst

byron · #3 Post by **byron** » Thu Nov 17, 2005 5:15 pm

ya.. i've tried that. actually, before i swapped the cards i uninstalled anything tied to that adapter (cisco vpn, sygate firewall, intel pro wireless and AC (including profiles)). powered down, swapped the cards, powered up, installed drivers, restart and it will not connect. installed AC, restarted and still nothing. It will connect using using AC or Windows wireless utility if I turn off encryption (i can't get WEP to work either).

Also, the machine seems a lot less responsive. If i fn + f5 and turn off the wireless card all the items on the desktop start flashing on/off like its a really really slow refresh. It's almost like it doesn't like the hardware. Maybe this is a really old card and it doesn't support WPA? lemme yank it out again and get a part number off of it.

EDIT: this is the driver i'm using.

http://www-306.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... MIGR-52527

byron · #4 Post by **byron** » Thu Nov 17, 2005 5:19 pm

this is the card that they sent me: 39T0071

http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/IBM_11a/b ... CI_Adapter

#5 Post by **jdhurst** » Thu Nov 17, 2005 6:26 pm

Something is screwy. I have that very driver loaded on my T41 with the newest version of Access Connections and it works flawlessly with WPA-PSK. I am using it here, now, as I write this.

So do try once more uninstalling Access Connections, restarting, uninstalling the wireless NIC completely, installing the new driver and then installing A/C 3.81. Should that not work, you may have a bad card.

byron · #6 Post by **byron** » Thu Nov 17, 2005 6:51 pm

uinstalled abg drivers & AC. restarted. installed ABG drivers. restarted. tried to configure it without AC being installed... same thing, can't get an address (almost like it doesn't know how to handle the key). installed AC. restarted. same thing with AC. Still no dice.

any chance that old windows WPA patch that is now included in SP2 is causing problems? my 2200BG worked on this very same build.

byron · #7 Post by **byron** » Thu Nov 17, 2005 7:29 pm

ok.. just got home from work and I got it to connect to my home network (which is also WPA-PSK) after a few tries (my router/AP is a Linksys WRT54GS running Sveasoft Alchemy v1.0). At work I'm using a 3com 802.11g AP. I guess it just doesn't like it.

However, when i double click the "wireless connection" signal strength meter thing in the system tray and click "find wLAN" and choose my home WPA-PSK network, I get the error message below. I know for a fact I didn't get this message with my old 2200bg card.

Any idea what this is all about? How to correct it?

byron · #8 Post by **byron** » Thu Nov 17, 2005 8:02 pm

in addition.... anything related to access connections seems to be responding at a snails pace. i know sometimes when the wireless card is trying to switch profiles or connect to a network it can be slow to respond but any time i click on the AC icon in the tray it takes it about 10 seconds (at least) to load the pop up menu.

i'm starting to lean towards a back up of the machine and a clean build from scratch.

#9 Post by **jdhurst** » Thu Nov 17, 2005 10:17 pm

I don't know the state of your machine, but the whole thing should work much better than you are describing. I click on A/C and the pop-up menu appears immediately. Perhaps a rebuild in these circumstances is warranted. ... JD Hurst

byron · #10 Post by **byron** » Thu Nov 17, 2005 10:23 pm

got fed up and rebuilt it.

done installing all the drivers and im about half finished with application installs. everything wireless wise is working so much more smoothly.

its times like this that i'm really glad i slipstreamed and fully automated a windows cd from my i386 directory when i took delivery. makes rebuilds so much less painful.

i will report back in this thread my results with my AP at work when i go in tomorrow.

byron · #11 Post by **byron** » Fri Nov 18, 2005 8:58 am

Seems to work now on the 3com AP that was giving me issues yesterday. It took a couple tries, but it worked. I thought I would check and see if there were firmware updates for the 3com AP that I was having issues with. Sure enough, there was, so I updated the firmware and it connected on the first try after updating the firmware.

On a side note, all of the machine level sluggishness and slow performance related to AC and the wNIC seem to be gone. I run a really tight build and don't install any crap on my machine, so I'm sure the machine wasn't bogged down with crap, windows network was probably on its last leg when you combine all the wLAN issues I had with the 2200bg and then you yank that card out and replace it with a different card. I guess that's par for the course.

Replacing 2200BG with IBM a/b/g... ?

Replacing 2200BG with IBM a/b/g... ?

Who is online