WPA2 on older laptops

Just changed my wireless base station to Apple Time Capsule, which do not have either WEP or WPA1 encryption, only WPA2. That is fine for all newer PCs and Mac in the house but not for my older Acer Ferrari 3200. It runs on XP SP3 and is up to date. The machine is 7 years old but still a mainstay and has served me well all these years. I've scanned the net for a possible solution for upgrading encryption but is not able to find out if this is hardware or software related. Any tip appreciated.

 

If the Base Station is set to WPA2 with AES (No TKIP) then WPA with AES should work because of the fall back. It might not work with the Apple Time Capsule, nor have i tried it with an N router which by standard requires WPA2 + AES.

As far as the machine goes you can always upgrade the adapter, if ACER whitelists only particular internal cards then a USB adapter would be the way to go.

Most hardware that supports WPA2 it will be fairly obvious, but just in case make sure the driver is up to date. Its not an XP issue as far as i remember as I have XP on this laptop.

 

A USB adapter is probably the best solution, I've checked with Acer but it seems that the last updates were frozen a few years ago. Thanks for the tip, most appreciated.

 

Acer does not whitelist WIFI cards, so just look up any modern card with the right formfactor and good reviews and replace the old one. I got an Intel 5100 card for < $10 on ebay for an old Acer with a full size PCI-e mini slot, and put it in my sons machine and mine (same model) and it worked like a champ. Except for that whole "doesn't wake from suspend in linux" thing. Hibernate worked tho, and since I use that way more no big loss.

 

I second sxooter, all you need is the right size pci wireless card and you are golden. They are very cheap on ebay but all you have to worry about is form factor, mini vs half-mini pci cards. If you need help with that you can post your current wireless card and someone, or me, could tell you.