T23 w/ built in wireless b and Access Connections USELESS!

[fefrie]

Well, I thought that I would take my trusty t23 out of the house and go on a road trip.

I had extreme difficulty with connecting to any wifi hot spot. I've always had issues and problems at some coffee shops, but with enough tweaking, I would be able to manage to get it to work. Not this time.

I reinstalled Access Connections so many times, and even tried a program called Easy Wi-Fi Radar. All with no luck.

Then it hit me. I have wireless b, and in the old days, there were a lot of b hotspots or b/g hotspots, but now that wireless b is pretty well phased out, wireless router manufacturers are probably creating routers with G as the default, and leaving B off. I don't have the heart to tell coffee shop employees how to configure their router for maximum accessibility.

To my next rant. IBM Access Connections. Even though my card is a wireless B, AC will still pick up G SSID's. Problem is that AC won't tell me if the signal is either G or B and it won't tell me if it's encrypted or not. VERY ANNOYING

I need to upgrade my built in wireless card on my 2647-9lu laptop. Is it possible to upgrade it to a wireless G/B card? And does IBM have a better solution to the B/G encryption display within it's access conneciton program? I must mention that I use win 2k on my t 23

[zdriver]

Upgrade your mpci B card to a 2200BG, 2915, or IBM/Athros based card. Use search to find compatible cards, but win2000 might be the limiting factor here, XP has better wireless driver & native support. You might consider an os upgrade as well.
When I had a T23, I used a Belkin G pcmcia card and it worked great.

[fefrie]

No offense, but I'm done with pcmcia cards.

These cards you speak of, which one would you say is the best upgrade. The card I have is the IBM High Rate Wireless card. Is the internal wireless card of the same format and standard as newer internal wireless cards today?

[rkawakami]

I use a Broadcom MiniPCI b/g card (BCM94306MP) and a Belkin wireless configuration program in my T23s. It also is supported by NetStumbler so you can use that program to survey the area and quickly see encryption status and speed.

In my usage, I go from my home's 802.11b AP, hibernate the system, take it to work, power up and latch onto the 802.11g signal. Takes only a couple of seconds to obtain an IP address and it's all automatic. No, I don't use Access Connections so I don't have the fancy features of re-assigning printers and home pages, but I don't miss it.

I believe that all MiniPCI wireless cards conform to the same pinout but do have differences in power output and physical heights of the cards. The T23 MiniPCI bay should be able to handle any card you get. Also, they use the same antenna connectors (U.FL).

You can find many other posts I've made by searching for "BCM94306*".

[fefrie]

Boy are they going for cheap on ebay.

BCM94306MP search on eBay

I copied the link to ebay. Which one should I get or are they all exactly the same? Based on your experience Roy, these are all B/G cards? Do these look like the one that is in your computer? If it works in yours then it should work in mine.

The only question I have Ray is do you have any problems with this card? Does it achieve sufficient performance when using Skype and does it maintain a solid connection with the router? Normally I wouldnt' worry, but I had another laptop where the wireless card's performance was so bad that it didn't do skype very well. Changing the card fixed that laptop. I just want to be sure that I can get good performance with this card.

thanks

Moderator edit: Shortened URL to prevent horizontal scrolling

[Raceboy]

What makes people think that b-standard is not working???

ALL wifi cards and routers are backwards compatible and it's software problem, not hardware incompatibility.

I have old Actiontech IBM High Rate Wifi in one of my laptops and 2100PRO in the other, both work flawlessly on whatever access point.

[fefrie]

I have old Actiontech IBM High Rate Wifi in one of my laptops and 2100PRO in the other, both work flawlessly on whatever access point.

Do you know for a fact that the AP's you log on to have both G and B set to on? Most routers these days are set so G is on and B is off.

And I don't see how my wireless B card could be backwards compatible to the G standard.

If I could buy a forward compatible anything, you can bet I'd buy it in a heartbeat

[Raceboy]

It's the access points that are backwards compatible NOT the cards being forward compatible.

Point me one router where you can "switch B off", please.

[fefrie]

It's the access points that are backwards compatible NOT the cards being forward compatible.

Point me one router where you can "switch B off", please.

http://reviews.cnet.com/routers/wireles ... 96906.html

"The WRT54G's only significant diversion from the usual setup procedure is the Wireless-G control. By default, the WRT54G is set to Mixed so that both Wireless-G and 802.11b clients can connect. However, given the slow throughput, we experienced when connecting to both types of clients simultaneously, you'd be better off setting the router to G-Only and forgetting about backward compatibility."


Thanks

[fefrie]

Thanks Ray for the help! As per your experience, I bought the Broadcom card for $20 delivered on ebay. A little expensive, but I got it fast and I needed it soon for my next road trip.

The original card removed pretty easily, there was a small cable that attached to the original actiontec card.

What does that cable do?

No more dial up modem for me?

The drivers I downloaded as a hp zd7000 and I used the zd7000 wireless config utility which ended up being an unbranded Broadcom wireless connect utility which looks exactly like the XP wireless connect utility.

I was having extreme problems finding a consistent conection through to the internet through my firewall. I spent a lot of time reinstalling drivers/wifi config programs/firewalls.

Usually with Zonealarm, if a program or an os subsystem want access to the internet, Zonealarm asks for permission first.

I wasn't getting enough of the 'ask for permissions' and connections wern't going through when the firewall was set up.

I had to manually set program permissions for the wifi config utility. It appears that the wifi config utility accesses the internet through it's own tunnel, and not through OS subsystems. I can't understand why it didn't trigger my firewall 'ask for permission' protocol, but that doesn't matter now.

The only 'issue' that I have now is that I've configured this card to access my home router with a specified ip address and DNS servers. I got that warning message of conflicting addresed IP addresses for the old card that was installed as described in this post here:

http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=61922

It doesn't matter for me since this conflict is only for at home and if I were on the road, I would just manually set the driver so that I'm automatically assigned an IP address through driver properties configure section.

Thanks Ray for the help. Anything I can do to extend the usefulness of my t23 i'm happy.

Still holding strong!

[fefrie]

well the firewall and the wifi access program are not getting along. everytime turn on the laptop I need to turn off the firewall and turn it on again to make the connection run fine. If the laptop is on all day it runs normal.

Can anyone point me to a better driver or WIFI connection program. It would be greatly appreciated. Thanks all.

[fefrie]

going to the HP website, download just the utility program for the zd7000 and not the utility program AND the driver.

They confict with each other, badly.

Just the 26mb program, install it, and now seems like no problems with zonelabs.