Thinkpads Forum

I have the 701c laptop with Win98 installed. It seems to load up and shut down very fast. But I can't seem to get my Sony PRD-650 cd-rom with a Adaptec scsi card to work. I only have the floppy drive working to load. Now if I want wireless I read that I will need a 16-bit pc card. Will Win98 detect the wireless card? What about updating the BIOS? Would it be better to uninstall Win98 and install Win95?

I think you will need to find a driver for your wireless card that supports Windows 98.
Windows 98 proabably will not find the driver on its own.

Updating the BIOS is possible if booting from a floppy. Check to see if you have the latest. I personally have not done wireless on my 701c...but you may hear from others. You can also use a PC card to access an ethernet connection. This is a handy way to download drivers and programs.

Good luck

Welcome to the forum,

Whoa - a lot of questions to answer. For the Wi-Fi - you will need to find the drivers along with a proper utility application for the wireless card (Windows should detect that card if inserted as an unknown device and ask for proper drivers). I used an Intersil Prism - chipset - based card a couple years back on my 701c under Windows 98 and it worked flawlessly (although older Wi-Fi cards support only the WEP encryption standard and from what I learned there was no wireless card on a 16-bit PCMCIA supporting WPA encryption). As for changing the OS - it all depends. I had to upgrade to Win98 from win95 because of the wireless card itself (the drivers didn't work on Win95) - i have 24 Megs of RAM, so it runs pretty good. As for the CD-ROM I can't help you there. I use a HP CD-Writer Plus 7200e which is connected to the paralell port (I also needed to make a Win98 boot floppy with the drivers to it to install Windows). I don't think that flashing the BIOS will help to solve that problem (have tried to rule out hardware malfunctions: PCMCIA Port-> Adaptec SCSI Card -> CD-ROM and are you certain that this CD-ROM will work on that card ?). If you want to flash the BIOS keep in mind that the laptop won't let you flash it if the battery is in poor condition (it simply won't start the flashing routine and throw a message).

Hope that my post provided some valuable info.

It is possible to add WiFi to a 701C. I'm running a LinkSys PCMCIA card in mine under Windows 98SE. Only a LinkSys WPC11 Version 3 will work -- the Version is very important as the Version 4 card is a CardBus type and will not fit in the socket. (Actually, 16 vs 32 bits has nothing to do with it -- it's the CardBus versus non-CardBus that makes the difference. I got mine on eBay, but you'll usually have to ask the seller what version is for sale. Just wanted to let you know that WiFi is possible, but it's not easy to get the system installed. I had to transfer the LinkSys Windows driver via floppy disks!

Good luck,

--Paul