Comments on: Coal-burning wifi

Question: Coal-burning wifi

sonofsamiam — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 06:54:16 -0800

I have an old laptop and want wireless on it.

Are there any wifi cards that fit the OLD pcmcia I/II slots? All the wifi cards I can find are Cardbus-era, which won't even fit in the slot. I don't have USB on this thing either, so that's not an option.

By: majick

majick — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 07:06:18 -0800

The Orinoco Silver ought to do the job. It's a PCMCIA Type 2 card, and probably one of the best ever made.

By: zixyer

zixyer — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 07:19:14 -0800

This might sound kind of bizarre, but when I installed a wireless card in my mom's ancient laptop, there was a problem where the wireless signal actually induced a current on the laptop's improperly shielded speaker wire, causing an annoying buzzing noise whenever data was sent over the network. This probably was only an issue for a scant few models of laptop, but it might be something you want to watch out for. Changing the volume had no effect, but plugging in headphones solved the problem.

By: sonofsamiam

sonofsamiam — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 07:33:24 -0800

majick: sounds great, thanks! I see they are cheep on ebay and have found several forum posts that say configuring it on my linux distro is a dream, so it looks to be exactly what I want.

By: mrg

mrg — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 08:48:37 -0800

FWIW, lots of companies make Orinoco Silver/Gold cards. (Gold means 128-bit WEP.) also look for Dell TrueMobile 1150 or Lucent WaveLAN cards (be wary about the WaveLAN ones though since Lucent used the name on some really old pre-802.11 cards too - make sure it says 802.11b).

By: that girl

that girl — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 08:52:51 -0800

The orinoco silver cards are wireless workhorses.

I got one as a hand-me-down from a friend, and it got better reception than most of the built-in ones my friends had. I knew someone who had one that had lost all of its casing and been otherwise mangled, and it still worked like a charm.

My only problem with it now is that the attached laptop has no working hard drive.