Thinkpads Forum

Kinda embarrassing but I'm completely stumped and I've spent two days trying to figure it out.

Central question: How would I go about cleaning out all the wifi stuff (drivers/programs) and doing a clean atheros adapter & access connections install on Windows 7?

Background: I'm attempting to upgrade a Windows 7 T60 to wireless N. To that end I purchased a Atheros AR5BXB72 card for the laptop. Previously the notebook had a Intel ABG card that worked. With the ABG card it connected to my (draft n) home router and the routers where I work/school (mostly all 'G's).

So I switched the cards last week (black on 1st connector / gray on 2nd / 3rd antenna open) and Win 7 automatically updated the driver and access connections saw my home router and connected. So I thought I was good.

Turns out, the newly installed Atheros adapter won't allow me to connect, or in some cases even see, G routers anymore. All the routers that I usually connected to at school, are seen but neither windows nor access connections will let me connect to them no matter what I do. It works fine at home with my -n router but in the lab sitting 10ft away from a G router the network will show up and try to connect only to suffer a authentication failure (or 'windows can't connect to the hidden network").

I've searched the board and couldn't figure it out. I've uninstalled drivers, updated drivers, downloaded drivers, uninstalled access connections, and no matter what I do I simply can't configure this adapter to connect to an open g network.

Seems pretty obvious that somewhere I configured the adapter wrong, but I have no idea where, so I want to do I clean install of all the adapter stuff in the hope of getting it right.

It must be something with Windows 7 because I've swapped wifi adapters before and once the driver loads, that's it. Not the case with atheros & win 7.

So I'm just looking for any guidance on what drivers to get rid, any settings that I need to tweak, and what order I should go about reinstalling everything.

Thanks.

Is that an IBM-approved wifi card?
There are boatloads of people having problems with this card (on the WWW).
Maybe a BIOS update with Whitelists removed may do the trick?
http://forums.mydigitallife.info/thread ... #post90337

Or try this driver: http://www.atheros.cz/atheros-wireless- ... 6&system=6

If you have a card with 3 connectors and only 2 antenna wires, you need to connect them to 0 and 2.

Alternatively get a halfsize miniPCIe Intel 6200N for 2 antenna wires (or 6300N if you have 3 wires) with halfsize adapter.
They do need a hacked BIOS but will definitely work.

RealBlackStuff wrote:Is that an IBM-approved wifi card?
There are boatloads of people having problems with this card (on the WWW).
Maybe a BIOS update with Whitelists removed may do the trick?
http://forums.mydigitallife.info/thread ... #post90337

Or try this driver: http://www.atheros.cz/atheros-wireless- ... 6&system=6

If you have a card with 3 connectors and only 2 antenna wires, you need to connect them to 0 and 2.

Alternatively get a halfsize miniPCIe Intel 6200N for 2 antenna wires (or 6300N if you have 3 wires) with halfsize adapter.
They do need a hacked BIOS but will definitely work.

In order:

1) I'm 99% sure that this is the IBM approved card. That was my intention anyway.

2) I'm running the latest IBM bios (2.27).

3) I just installed that driver last night, so I'll test it in the lab today and see how it goes.

4) Funny, I read in several threads (namely this one, http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=79224) here that the correct 2 wire antenna connection was 1 (black) 2 (grey) with 3 left open) so that's what I went with. I'll give 0/2 a try, with I assume the gray antenna being attached to 0 (and black to 2)

5) Well since web access is essential for school I've got to get this solved somehow. I'm not against the Intel 6200N and modded bios. I'll give this card one last shot today, and if I can't get it to work then I'll have to go with Intel and a modded bios.

Thanks RB, I'll post later how it goes.

RealBlackStuff wrote:If you have a card with 3 connectors and only 2 antenna wires, you need to connect them to 0 and 2.

Never let there never be any question as to if RealBlackStuff is the man!

That was it. I went according to the wire setup stated below:

This is the usual arrangement for a WLAN card:
Gray cable = MAIN or TR1
Black cable = AUX or TR2
White cable = 3rd or R0 listed in the linked thread below

from this thread -http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=79224).

Once I reset the wires using the setup stated by RealBlack the card instantly picked up all available networks and allowed me to connect.

I connected the black antenna wire to the #2 connector (far left), I left the center connector (#1) open and connected the gray wire to #0 (far right).

Now everything works.

I guess I was thrown off by the fact that I could connect to my home router so I thought that my wire connections weren't the problem.

Thanks RealBlack and let this be a note for anyone attempting to connect to this card in the future.

smw6230 wrote:
Now everything works.

What speed do you get from it now, on an n router?

What a blessing!!
Now it doesn't crash on every boot or every time I flick the Fn+F5 after switching to Atheros card

RealBlackStuff wrote: Or try this driver: http://www.atheros.cz/atheros-wireless- ... 6&system=6