is the intel pro wireless 2200BG compatible w/ non-centrino

[tommyj27]

good morning y'all,

when i ordered my 2378fvu i also bought the 802.11a/b/g minipci card because the installed intel pro/wireless 2200b/g adaptor doesn't suit my needs. so now i've got this extra adaptor lying about that i'd like to stick in my brother's laptop, a dell 5150 (P4, 855PM? chipset). i tried installing it and found some drivers that made the card claim to be working properly in the windows device manager. but when i went to try and join one of my wireless networks it wouldn't find any when it scanned for networks. does the 2200b/g only work with centrino chipsets or could i be doing something wrong. first and foremost i'm a linux goon, so i'll be the first to admit that my experience with wireless in windows is pretty anemic. like i said before, the device manager would show the card working properly, but the windows 'find wireless networks' function doesn't return any networks (there are 2 within 20' of where the notebook was. i also used a third-party driver, i don't even remember what vendor it was, because the driver file i found on ibm's website didn't seem to exist on their ftp server. i had the antenna leads on the dell connected properly as well, so i don't believe that would be causing problems.

TIA,
tom

[Leon]

not sure why you're not working, but if you have the proper drivers, it should work, centrino or not....

[admsteiner]

Centrino is not a chipset but a marketing brand. It consists of the chipset, a Pentium-M processor and an intel wireless card. As long as there are drivers for it, I would think it would work.

I can only speculate but I recall hearing that you can't buy a regular wireless card and just put it into the IBM, rather the card needs to be flashed so that the Thinkpad will allow for it to be used (do a forum search and you should find more info on this). Perhaps when flashing it so that it works on the IBM it only makes it inoperable on a Dell...

--Adam