t61 uwb wusb feature. Has anyone gotten this to work???

[andre#4]

Has anyone actually gotten this feature to work? If so, what are the problems you have encountered in the process of getting it operational?

Since so few people know what this is, I have described it below:

UWB is Ultra Wide Band
WUSB is Wireless Universal Serial Bus (has nothing to do with wifi and does not connect to a usb port)


I have not seen any evidence that anyone has gotten this feature to work. I have seen posts about driver problems, bsod's, and a lot of people asking each other what it is, but no evidence of it working. In other words, using your usb devices without wires.


THis is a feature that was available on t61's and later machines. It is a mini pcie card with an antenna.

It enables you to eliminate all usb wires from your machine. THere are 2 ways to do it.

1.
THe cheap way, which is to buy a wusb hub. It is like a regular usb hub, except it does not connect to the computer with a usb wire. It has an antenna on it. This antenna talks to the antenna hidden inside the thinkpad. (the one that is connected to the wusb uwb mini pcie card.) THe hub has several usb ports, which you use to plug in your usb devices. Printer, camera, tethered phone as modem, etc etc. This makes it so you don't have so many wires attached to the machine and it is easier to get up out of bed to feed the dog. Also can be used to feed the monitor. Either through a usb port replicator or through one of the uwb wireless monitor kits. You can put the hub and all your peripherals wherever you want, and be free from them.

2. The other way to do it is to buy new peripherals that have the uwb wusb radios built in to themselves. Or to buy little mini uwb wusb hubs for each one (perhaps little thumb drive looking things).

On my thinkpad, I have the power, the monitor, the sound, the external hard disk, and the PAM (phone as modem), and it is quite a pain to have all those wires coming from all sides of the machine. I could eliminate all of these with this technology and some extra batts.

[davidhbrown]

It appeared to work when I first got my T61p (Vista installed), before upgrading to Windows 7. I never got around to buying a WUSB hub, and I can no longer find any hint that Certified WUSB products are still sold looking at newegg, cdw, tigerdirect, and amazon.

IIRC, drivers are not available for Windows 7; the company that made the PCI card no longer supports it or even is no longer in business. (I can no longer find the page on Lenovo's site where I thought I read this... I had thought it was on the Windows 7 BETA drivers page, but there is no longer any mention. Perhaps they just don't want to speak ill of the dead...)

Here is the latest available driver which should support Vista and XP, if you're feeling retro: http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... MIGR-68278.

Anyone know if I can remove this card from my T61p to get rid of the "Unknown device" without undesirable consequences like, say losing Bluetooth or WiFi?

[RealBlackStuff]

So many T61 came without it, that it certainly is only an 'option'.
You can remove it without any penalty, I'd say.