T40 intermittent freezing with wireless card inserted

[barnesy99]

Hello, my T40 has started freezing when a wireless card or dongle is inserted.

Model 2373-14G. All fine using an ethernet cable connection and up to a few weeks ago was fine using dongles etc.

No wireless installed originally.

It now freezes every 20-30 seconds for a few seconds but only with a dongle/card inserted - I have changed the dongle to a new Belkin Wireless G Notebook Card without success.

So far I have:-

Reset to factory settings
Updated XP (SP3 now installed)
Run PC Doctor - all tests are passed with card out and in.
Updated BIOS from IBM
Updated Belkin driver

As I've said this only happens with a wireless usb dongle or card in and has become frustrating as the boys like to use for surfing mainly (hence the reason why I was happy to do a factory reset as we don't store much on there). Was considering getting an internal wireless card however not convinced that this will sort the issue - any thoughts? Without the wireless item installed I have no problems using the Thinkpad generally.

Looking through the forums I've seen various problems however nothing exactly the same.

Any assistance would be much appreciated by myself and my sons - thanks all.

[RealBlackStuff]

Welcome to the Forum.
Yours is a quite common problem with the USB ports not working properly.
See this thread: http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=70955 which offers some solutions.
My suggestion would be to put in a MiniPCI wifi card (e.g. Intel 2200BG) under the keyboard, rather than trying a USB wifi dongle.
If you do need USB, get a PCMCIA USB2.0 adapter.
Let us know how the tests go from above thread.

[barnesy99]

Will try some USB tests however the Notebook Card is doing the same thing so I thought that not a USB problem. Are the card ports and USB ports connected?

[poshgeordie]

PM sent.

[RealBlackStuff]

What do you consider a Notebook Card? Is that a MiniPCI card? A PCMCIA card?
What do you consider card ports?
AFAIK the MiniPCI card is not connected to the USB ports.

[barnesy99]

The Belkin Notebook card is a 32-bit Cardbus - goes in one of the two slots on the left hand side of the T40 near the front.

[poshgeordie]

Removed

[RealBlackStuff]

I'm only guessing here, but I thank I read somewhere that PCMCIA and USP are somehow interconnected.
Since your T40 is wifi upgradable, it means your T40 has built-in antennas and a wifi slot (under the keyboard bezel/palm rest).
Borrow such a card and see how wifi goes, it should improve quite a bit.