cheap (supported) wifi card

[Steve Franks]

On 8/9/07, Don Hinton <hintonda at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi:
>
> I recently purchased a new HP dv9500t laptop.  Unfortunately, the
> Intel 4965AGN wireless card it came with isn't supported (yet).  I
> tried to use ndisgen, but it caused a panic (both 6.2 and
> 7.0-current).

I'm afraid you are in big trouble with a name-brand laptop.  You
cannot put a non-vendor approved minipci card in it without the bios
locking you out.  I tried no less than 3 different cards before I
Google'd it and found this is a common problem - bios checks the
vendor id or somesuch and won't even boot the bios config screen until
you take the card out.  I read this happends with HP, Dell, everyone.
FIrst it was the recording industry, not laptop vendors.  Next you're
going to have to pay a yearly fee for them to even boot.

Get a nice PCMCIA or USB card with an Atheros or Prism (and some
Realtek - just got burned with a new realtek, however)  chipset and
you're good to go.  I have a $35 store-brand card from OfficeMax that
works like a charm - my HP laptop has a broadcomm in it, and I'm
running amd64 - supposedly the 64 bit broadcomm drivers don't even
work with Vista - big panic ndiswrapping them - gave up.  Just Google
the part number and chipset before you buy it.

Steve