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Getting more range on a WiFi card

chips ahoy — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 10:07:44 -0800

How do I get more WiFi range on my laptop computer? More info follows. I know the obvious answer here is to stick an antenna on my wireless adapter card. The problem is that none of my cards appear to have an antenna jack!

I looked on my Office Depot site for something quick I could pick up today, but all the PC card models shown only have internal antennas and there is no indication whether any of them can take an external antenna.

Googling this I'm coming up empty, and I looked on some of the wardriving forums, specifically the netstumbler forum, but mostly what I found were soldering mods and snarky answers to people asking the same thing.

I use Windows and have a Dell laptop, if it matters, and I'd prefer not to have to spend more than $80 on this. Please no suggestions for fixing the base station; thanks.

PC card reader broken - Can anything be done?

likedoomsday — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 13:51:16 -0800

My (secondhand) Sony Vaio PCG-V505DC2 laptop's PC Card slot isn't recognizing any cards put in it (I've tried three, all of which I know work). I know it's not a driver problem because all of the cards worked until recently, when they started working only intermittently before stopping working at all. Can this be fixed in any kind of cost-effective way, preferably by myself? When they're plugged in, nothing happens; the "power" light on the ones that have them doesn't activate.

I'm not terribly afraid of opening the laptop and doing some very basic fiddling, but I'm not good enough at soldering to do anything really involved. Sony wanted something on the order of $150 just to look at it, which is out of the question. Is there anything that can be done?

The laptop is running Windows XP Professional, has a 2.0 GHz processor, 40 GB hard drive, 512 MB RAM, though I doubt it's particularly relevant.

What do you put in your PC card slot?

Nikolai — Fri, 24 Feb 2006 22:59:30 -0800

What do you put in your PC card slot? Nowadays, many laptops come with stuff like Wi-Fi and flash card readers built-in (as mine does), and it seems like every peripheral is connected through USB. Eight years ago my modem lived in the PC card slot. But is there anything cool and/or useful I can do with it today?