HP DV9060us - Intel 3945ABG Grief

Hello

A former Acer owner here with a repalced Atheros card that never once disconnected from my home network is a little miffed and my current HP ability to keep the connection.

I am running Media 2005 (which is basically XP) and will likely upgrade to Vista as soon as all my software works. The scenario for me is I loose Internet connection. The wireless status indicates connection still good , but I always have to repair to get Internet. What is strange is if I happen to be using VPN or Cisco to remote into another site that connection remains.

I updated the Intel 3945ABG card with the latest driver. The Laptop is mostly about 2 feet from the WAP. It is just driving me nuts!

Anyone else have this issue ? Unfortunatley my Acer Atheros card will not fit in the HP , I would replace it in a heartbeat. Has anyone repalced this card and if so what did you uses ? (I head read somewhere that HP will not generally accpet other cards).

thx........dy

 

I do not have an HP, but from what I can tell from what you said, the Atheros card that you had in your Acer is probably a Mini-PCI. The HP you have uses Mini-PCI Express i believe. You can find Atheros Mini-PCI Express cards online, as my T60 Widescreen uses one (Atheros 5006EX). I found a link here for one:
http://www.ewiz.com/detail.php?name=GN-WI01GT

Oh, I see on your sig that it is a MiniPCI

 

HP has a whitelist in the BIOS that only allows a few HP-provided WiFi cards. You can use any ExpressCard card you want though, if any ExpressCard WiFi cards are available, but then you won't be able to use the notebook's WiFi antennas that are mounted behind the screen.

AFAIK that whitelist is still there at least. I ran into it when I tried to swap an Atheros card into my zv5000z.

HP's AMD-based notebooks use Broadcom WiFi cards, which are less Linux-hostile than they used to be but I'd still prefer Atheros. Better than Intel though, apparently?

 

Cool so what kind of external card can I use ? Any recommendations

 

Yeah, Atheros is much better than Intel. As for external cards, Belkin does make an N expresscard. Best Buy carries it. The N Expresscard will work with A/B/G/N.

 

try changing the channel. I used to use channel 4 i think, and i was ROCK solid.
i had to change the channel to 10 becuase of interference with my mouse, and it drops every so often, my router is only couple feet away as well.

 

Update:

The card has been rock solid last few days. My issue was - I have my WAP (Linksys WRT54GS V2) slaved on a Sonicwall TZ170 router. The Sonicwall has a VPN tunnel to my work site.

With my Acer and Atheros I always used work server DNS servers. Once I changed the DNS servers to 'DEFAULT' (assigned by my ISP) the connection has been very solid and consistent.

I cannot explain why - but this was the issue for me. Channel / Hardware / etc all seem good now. Albiet I would love to go back to the work DNS servers as it makes name resolution much easier.