WIFI card replacements?

I am thinking of upgrading my wifi laptop card to gain N communication with my router. The laptop that I like to update are for my Gateway Nv52 and Acer 5315 and Toshiba L305 of which they all seem to have the PCI-e wifi card and I did find one that looks like a fit and has b/g/n wifi. The card is ATHEROS PCI-E MINI 802.11N WIFI CARD WLAN AR5B91 will this card fit in all three laptop thus gaining me N connections and microsoft wifi miniport connections?

 

The adapter i recommend is the Intel 6200 or the 6300 if you want a three stream card.

If your laptops have full height cards instead of half-height ones, you can buy an half-height to full height adapter on ebay as long as you have the extra inch or antenna wires to reach the shorter half-height card.

 

My connectors are only two steam not three...the three steam are only in my P-6860FX, M6862 gateway only. I did also upgrade my Dell 1525 to a Dell 1505 N series card and that upgrade did work well as I did gain Microsoft wifi miniport of which I like.

Just two steam and only comes in PCI-e mini card and the slot doesn't permit a half height card.

 

If you have full height adapters, you can definitely fit half height in there, anyways i'll post a pic of my N50 with the half-height 6200 + adapter in it when i get home and i have yet to see a laptop where the antenna wires didn't have the extra needed length, though i guess it's possible. Older Intel cards like the 4965 are full height though so i'd go with a full height intel. I think the 5xxx Intels are full height too.

EDIT: You can use a three stream card with two antennas too, sometimes prices for older adapters are kinda strange.

 

tijo is correct. Half height cards have supplanted full height cards, but you can get an adapter super cheap on ebay to fit any half height card into a full height slot.

The Intel 5100 and 5200 cards came in both full and half height varieties.

Out of the 4965, 5100, 5300, just get whatever is cheapest.

 

That is what i did since the Intel 6200 was dirt cheap compared to the full height cards i managed to find that were decent enough to replace the Atheros crap i had. Atheros makes some quite good adapters (The bigfoot cards are actually Atheros cards), but they also have some pretty bad ones so if you ever want to go with Atheros, you have to be careful.

Slight thread hijack while i'm at it, well it could help the OP in his decision but it's because i want to know. How does the 4965 stack up against the 6200 if both are on two streams? I pulled a 4965 from a friend's dead laptop and i could use it in my N50, put the 6200 in the T420 i got for my mother to replace the Intel 1x1 card she has in it.

 

That is a really tough question. If you have access to both at the same time, test to see it out for yourself. Between the two, it would be really hard to pick a winner, but if you put a gun to my head I would say 4965.

That also got me thinking, don't get the 5100. The other cards are a lot better. Get the 4965 or 5300 full size cards.

 

I have 2200BG/3945/4965/5100/5300/6200/6300. After 4965, it's hard to tell the difference honestly, though 5300/6300 support dual band. In my house, everything above 3945 gets max bars for signal strength. Again the difference is minimal IMO after 4965.

 

4965, 5100, 5300, 6200 and 6300 support dual-band.
5300 and 6300 are the only ones to support 3 streams (which makes sense only if you own or plan to buy a three stream router).

I agree on 5100 being the weak one- not only is it known to be troublesome but it's also a 1T2R card (meaning while it's capable of receiving at 300mbps it can only transmit at 150mbps).

I would skip the older ones and choose 5300, 6200 or 6300- based on price probably.

 

Well from the internals of how my connectors look I would if I could go with the 5300 since they aren't to expensive to get from ebay. For the increase in bandwidth as well as those were named as being able to do the HP wifi mouse as well.

 

Is there any downside to using a 6300 with two stream router? I know there is no benefit vs. a 6200, but I was wondering if there were any problems to be aware of.

 

Absolutely not, you can run the 6300 with two antennas too and it'll behave just like a 6200.

 

I installed a half height 6300 adapter into my XPS 1730 and used a toothpick cut to length to hold the card down. Works awesome.

 

DIY solutions also work, but you can go with something nicer than a toothpick. Here is a more professional alternative (Cheap hlaf to full height bracket from ebay)

 

4965 is not a dual band card. [EDIT] .. or is it ... LOL

I had one of those and replaced it with 5300 - much better IMO, and not only because it can work on the 5GHz band. My 4965 was having hard time keeping connection stable for some reason.

the GFs Dell D630 came with same 4965agn card but a little different revision than mine (I think mine was 1.0.40 and hers is 2.0.40), and it works somewhat better.

 

Is there two versions of the 4965, because agn means both bands?

 

the two versions are one with N and another one without N support.

 

I see, well according to Intel, the agn does 5GHz, i'll have to check out for myself though, i'm guessing the other one didn't.

 

alright I had to dig up some info about this.

on both of our computers there was no options for the 5GHz channel, as I'm having that with the 5300 card. Apparently the 4965 came as a Draft-N at the beginning (2007 I think), thus might be that the upper channel was not actually enabled/available. Could it be driver issue ... dont know. Point is there were/are no options what so ever for the upper band on our laptops, both of which are from 2007. We used the latest drivers from our manufacturers (lenovo for me, and dell for the gf)

so now I'm not sure if there's been update on those cards. All I know is that there's 4965 abg and 4965 agn (what we have/had).

 

I do know my two gateway does have the 4965 and with Intel drivers work at N speed. I don't load drivers from lenovo or dell as those are the older drivers and not the latest drivers.