upgrade network card thinkpad e220s

Has anyone upgraded the network card for the thinkpad e220s? I recently discovered that my "thinkpad b/g/n" is a realtek wireless network card that does not support 5ghz band 802.11n and my large file transfers to my NAS are slow. I would like to upgrade to the intel 5300 but I understand that there is a BIOS lenovo whitelist on the thinkpads . I have seen some lenovo certified 5300 cards on ebay but they do not list the e220s under the supported models, eg

IBM Lenovo Thinkpad Intel® Ultimate N WiFi Link 5300 | eBay

There appear to be some hacks to add cards to the BIOS, or modify the cards to spoof the BIOS, as discussed here

Problem with unauthorized MiniPCI network card - ThinkWiki

but again they do not mention the e220s anywhere on that page.

Finally, changing the network card on the e220 looks doable but non-trivial, as detailed on page 64 here

http://download.lenovo.com/ibmdl/pub/pc/pccbbs/mobiles_pdf/0a60672.pdf

So there are a lot of unknowns here, and I'm wondering if anyone has done this successfully. The final wrinkle is I'm running linux.

JDH

 

First off, what speeds are you currently getting, and what would you like to get?

I have an Intel 1000 in my e220s, and driver support in Debian is fine after installing the "iwlwifi" driver currently in the repo. Intel Linux support is described here:

Intel® Wireless WiFi Link drivers for Linux*

edit: this is to say nothing about Lenovo's card whitelist. I'm not familiar which ones are on there.

 

I'm currently getting 5MB/s to my Western Digital My Book Live NAS over ssh with the Linksys e4200 wireless router. I realize this is a pretty slow NAS, with many people reporting speeds between 4-7MB/s, but I am planning to upgrade to something faster, eg a Synology or d-link dns-325 which should do around 30-40MB/s on a good network according to reviews and posts I've seen. I'd be happy with those numbers.

But before I plunk down the additional money for the faster NAS, I wanted to see if the network card on my laptop could get there, and I came across a number of posts saying the card was slow and couldn't access the 5ghz band so I wanted to look into upgrading that as well.

 

That's a bit slow, even for 2.4GHz N. Have you tried to connect to the NAS using wired Gb ethernet, to see what speed you get with that? That should at least determine what potential the NAS and router are currently offering.

 

Good suggestion. With wired connectivity laptop -> router and NAS -> router both over wired gigabit ethernet gives me 9.3MB/s. I just repeated the wireless test in close proximity to the wireless router and got an overall transfer speed of 5.4MB/s on a 300MB file (initial rate was higher and then slowed on sustained write). So the NAS appears to be slow, but I'm losing a good bit over the wireless transfer too it looks like.