Disabling on board wireless card

[likesspace]

Hi guys,

I have a T43 that has built in wireless.
I am getting to upgrade our home network from G to N wireless so I will be using N USB adapters on all of our T43 computers.

First of all, do I really need to disable the on board wireless to make the USB adapter work and if so, how do I go about doing it?

If anyone can give me some advice I'd really appreciate it.

Dave

[GomJabbar]

You can easily disable it in Windows Device Manager [Start > Control Panel > System > Device Manager > Network Adapters].

Really though, you should not need to disable it. If the proper drivers are currently installed, you can use Fn + F5 to bring up the dialog box to turn off the wireless radio (and turn it back on again).

[Mike Blake]

I once fooled around with using a USB external DLink adapter without disabling the built-in adapter on my T23 and 42. Since you can only choose one adapter per network connection, I found they didn't seem to conflict as far as coexisting went, as I could only use one at a time.

[likesspace]

Hey guys, thanks for the replies.
I'm using a Linux machine as is all of my family so device manager is not an option.
It is good to know that only one wireless device can be used at a time and that it can be managed with Fn+F5
I'm going to be the test subject for wireless n and then we'll make the decision if everyone makes the switch. Hopefully it will increase both signal strength and speed to all of our computers (currently 5 T43's and one Desktop).
I wasn't planning on making the switch to N but yesterday's woot wouldn't let me wait.
I picked up a SMC N router and a SMC wireless adapter for $25.00 shipping included. That was just too good to pass up.

Anyway, thanks a lot for the information. I'm looking forward to my router arriving so that I can give it a try.

Dave

[RealBlackStuff]

N will only give you speed advantages if you are sending large files over the network all the time.
The speed of your ISPS's internet is probably capped at less than 10Mbps, so there's nothing to be gained there.
But N does have a better range.

[ThinkRob]

You shouldn't need to disable onboard wireless in order to use an external wireless card.

Still, if you want to make sure that the onboard NIC isn't active, you can just unload the corresponding kernel module. If you tell me what your onboard WLAN card is, I can tell you what that would be.

[tom lightbody]

or, since you're using linux, if the built-in interface is "wlan0" then

ifconfig wlan0 down

should work. Another solution, assuming a mini-PCI card, is to remove it.

My experience is that linux networking works properly only when just one
adapter is up: so if you have two or more, all but one must be taken down.

[ThinkRob]

My experience is that linux networking works properly only when just one
adapter is up: so if you have two or more, all but one must be taken down.

Uh... I've actually got a system with two active WLAN adapters at the moment. One's an Intel WLAN (internal), and the other is an external (USB) Prism2-based device. Seems to work fine for me, although I'm not using them on the same network (or even on similar types of networks...)

[billp117]

You can turn the wireless off via the BIOS.