Wireless Upgrade

[Martin_172]

Hi guys, was looking for something a bit more powerful to replace my old T23 that has served me well for the last 4 years or more, facied another T series and have just bought a T40 as they seemed to come in at a good price and a few upgrades will bring it up to the spec im looking for!

Already ordered a Samsung HM160HC 160gb hdd as ive had great experiance with them in the past being one if not the fastest IDE laptop drive available and ordered 2GB of ram for it. now just on the look out for a Dothan 780 2.26GHz CPU and ill be happy!

anyway im getting away from the point here! the one i have isnt a centrino model so has no build in wireless, im using a PCMCIA card at the moment but would ideally like to fit a wireless card however this is something ive never played with before!

if its possible, what is the best card to go for?
can i have wireless N?
does the T40 have a build in antenna for such upgrade?

sorry for all the questions, thanks for your help in advance!

[ajkula66]

Welcome to the forum!

PM780 will not work in a T40, you need PM 745/755/765.

Have fun upgrading it...

[Martin_172]

cheers for the info, so a 765 is the quickest chip i can use?

fitted the next hard drive today and gave it a fresh install of Windows XP Pro SP3 with all the latest updates and drivers and the thing is flying even on the 1.5ghz and 512mb! running the page file on a 2gb partition of its own and even with music running in the background, web browsing, email, windows live messenger running etc its running perfectly! think i may just find a 2nd 512mb RAM chip for it rather than replacing both with 2 x 1gb modules.

anyone got any advice on the wireless issue in my first post?

cheers

[RealBlackStuff]

On the bottom of tha laptop is an IBM sticker with what looks like: TYPE 2373-42U S/N xx-xxxx
What is the TYPE on your laptop?
Some T40 models came pre-wired for wifi, but without a wifi card (which 'hides' under the keyboard).

[Martin_172]

type 2373-8cg s/n - 32pbl

cheers

[rkawakami]

What RBS was trying to find out is this:

P M 1.5GHz, 256MB RAM, 40GB 5400rpm HDD, 14.1 XGA(1024x768) TFT LCD, 32MB ATI Radeon 7500, 24x-8x DVD(slim), Modem(CDC), Ethernet(LOM), Wireless upgradeable(MPCI), Secure Chip, UltraNav, 6 cell battery, WinXP Pro

This means that the laptop should have the antennas already in place.

Whether or not you can use an "N" wireless card may have to do with how comfortable you are in installing a "hack" to get around the BIOS' whitelist. This is typically known as the no-1802 issue.

[Martin_172]

cheers for the info, not that fussed about the hack, wireless G will be fine, so whats the best or most common used card to upgrade these then? ive managed to source a new cpu and ram so ill just do the wireless upgrade while im at it!

cheers

[ajkula66]

Take a look under #14 here:

http://support.lenovo.com/en_US/product ... D=PD011019

Two most popular ones are Intel 2200BG and IBM a/b/g and both of them will work well in your machine.

[Martin_172]

Cheers for all your help, just ordered a 2200BG adaptor for it, from what i can make out on the image does this just pop into the slot and then the 2 antenna's connect by screw to the card?

does this now make mine a Centrino model?

[ajkula66]

The antennae just "snap on" onto the card, which slides into the mini-PCI slot under the palmrest.

And yes, the machine will display a "Centrino" on boot logo once an Intel card is installed.