SZ Upgrade: 4965AGN and 3 Wire Antenna

Has anyone tried removing the bezel or wifi antenna from the LCD panel on an older SZ 100, 200 or 300 series to install the 3 lead draft N ePCI card and antenna? I have read Lyshen's thread where he reports that he added a single lead to an existing 2 wire design, purchased off eBay, that worked well.

Lyshen's link is here.

I called Sony parts and purchased the latest wireless N 3 lead antenna from a new SZ780. It should arrive in the next couple of days. I am going to replace the 3945 wireless card with the 4965AGN and install the new 3 wire antenna but I am slightly tentative about how to break down the LCD? I think using the 3 wire antenna from a newer Sony SZ will be more effective than adding a third lead to a bi wired existing antenna (older SZ) but I am speculating a bit as I have not seen either antenna yet?

Here are some links that I have been saving which show how to break a Sony SZ down. I have not been on this site in a few months so please forgive me if this information has been recently covered.

Hard drive install guide

Tear down guide for various Sony laptops

 

Here are some of my observations. I hope this might offer help to anyone who is considering adding draft "N" wireless capability to SZ notebooks prior to the 600 series. I did not have to re-route the antenna but I did have to add one antenna lead. I followed Lyshen's suggestion and routed it under the palm rest. Very simple to install. Just remove four screws from the bottom. Take the keyboard and palm rest off. Wireless ePCI wlan card is located just under the mouse touch pad. Installation was very straight forward and now my laptop has built in A/B/G/N wireless.

 

I have certainly liked the way you have upgraded your notebook overtime! Think you have maxed it out now, the only other thing I can see you doing is upgrading to SSD. Other than that, you have done well.

 

wow, you made a great job!

how much did you paid for that ABGN wifi card?

 

Thank you. I have always worked on and built my own pc's but not so much notebook computers. After I upgraded the hard drive (last year) I realized how easy it was to get inside. Now I feel comfortable working inside the tiny notebook. This computer has taught me a lot, inside and out. I even changed the keyboard to silver just to be different than I found that I liked the silver keyboard better because it was easier to see in the dark with the reflected light from the lcd.

I bought the wireless card from Amazon for $35. I bought the extra antenna from Sony but I think I overpaid for it. I paid $22us and they are cheaper on eBay. The antenna Sony sent me said Hitachi on it...

 

As I can see you have a 4gig ms card in your notebook working as readyboost memory

do you feel a lot of performance gain with that?

 

Yes, I notice programs run from cache. Superfetch is the most important feature of Vista. Having ram and readyboost allows programs to open as if they were "minimized" rather than loading from disk.

 

and what about those 4gb of system ram?
did your computer detect all that memory?, I have a sz3 with 2gb and i would like to upgrade to to 2x2gb

thanks
borjazd

 

Hi Borjazd,
Take a look at my avatar. It shows that I have 4gb of ram in Vista but I think there is a 3gb limit in all 32bit operating systems so not all of the ram is addressed / used. I had a hard time understanding that, even though the ram shows 4gb in Vista that it doesn't use all of it but I googled and read a lot about it and apparently that is the case. I definitely notice a big difference in my notebook speed using the 4gb of ram and 4gb readyboost. My friend was watching over my shoulder as I was doing something on the computer and he was amazed at how fast programs like Word, IE, Firefox, Picasa, Vegas, and others just open with very little hard drive effort. He is also an IT professional, with a very fast machine and after he saw the speed I was getting he went straight out and purchased a thumb drive for his readyboost. 4gb of ram (2 x 2gb) sells for $65us and I sold my old 2gb of ram for $30us. It was well worth it, imo.
Good luck,
Jimmy

Ram $55 for 4gb

 

thank you for your responses.
also i read that SZ's until SZ6 will only recognise up to 3.2gb, although if you install a 64bit OS, because this is a limit of the motherboard, not OS.

 

BorjaZD,
I don't completely understand the limitation but others have explained it as the OS. There is a thread floating around somewhere here on this forum where I asked about it. I got a really good answer but I couldn't find the thread to post a link. After I searched Google just now, I found this explanation. Here is a link to the thread.
Jimmy
PS. The aircard install went very well and I am receiving wireless N now. Good luck with your upgrades.

<SNIP> Taken from thread linked above....


I've said this many times and I will say it again... XP CAN ACCESS 4GB. Here is why you see less:

This is a limitation of a 32-bit architecture. The system can only address 4 GB of allocated memory. Allocated memory is made up of physical RAM, and any I/O space needed by devices. The way memory is allocated is that starting at 4 GB, the system allocates device I/O addresses working its way down. Normally this is not a problem, but when systems have 4 GB of physical memory, the addresses needed to address RAM overlap the space needed for I/O. In this case, the need for I/O space takes precedence, and the amount of RAM visible to the operating system and applications is limited to 4 GB minus I/O space. Examples of devices that consume I/O space are:

System BIOS
PCI Express configuration space and memory for PCI Express device(s)
Memory mappy I/O
Motherboard Resources (I/OxAPIC)
Chipset
PCI Enumeration

For example: If you have 4GB of system memory, an Intel 915g Express chipset, Windows XP with Service Pack 2, and a PCI Express graphics card the remaining system memory as reported by System Information would be ~3.25GB. The same configuration but with 2GB of system memory would result in all 2GB being available. This is due to the limited capability of memory mapping (or limited amount of addresses) on 32-bit architecture systems.

EDIT:

Windows XP can utilize more than 2GB of memory as well. However, 2GB of memory is the most that XP can allocate to a particular task.