mini pci-e wireless card recommendations wanted

[anomaly65]

Hi all,

nice wife bought me a new shiney new hp laptop. has broadcom 4311 card in it. hate it. really hate it. native driver drops and it's cheaper to buy a new card than spend time dorking around with all the rest of the stuff. Took a darned shoehorn to get Vista off the laptop. second drive and XP is running wireless. Still hate it.

Intel, atheros? I'm looking for a chip OEM, I'll worry about finding a card with the chip on it. We all know that any card sold for end users is likely to have 2-4 revisions and chips in a lifecycle.... I've seen/searched/read loads of half answers, but just want reasonable wireless on par with what I got years ago with lousy XP. I figure why not ask the folks who know. (sorry, the more linux becomes "for the masses" the less reliable the answers google returns). I mention intel as they seem to support linux, and that's the only chip on an ethernet nic card I'll buy as the drivers are superb in linux, bsd, and windows.

I've been a gentoo user for years now, and now am enjoying the sabayon yummy taste nice work folks. before that, a good ten years in *bsd and solaris land as a kernel programmer. Once you hit 40 years old, it's easier to shell out $40 for a decent card than to tolerate a half-arse solution from a company (broadcom) that doesn't even provide decent windows drivers (there are no 'original' downloads on their site, you have to hunt and guess which end manufacturer has the most up to date versions), much less *nix ones.

thanks in advance,
andy

p.s. 802.11 b/g is fine. a and n not needed. Already have three b/g access points to cover my house (lots of metal inside walls for HVAC etc). don't see replacing them with n capable hardware anytime soon.

And I'll happily report back results once new hardware arrives.

[WarraWarra]

Depends on the version you have of SL some work better with mini while others works nicely in SL Prof . There seems to be 2 versions one more Dell related and the other more HP / Toshiba and I presume something along the lines of the actual mini pci slot connector type is where the issues lies.

Dell has the 1 postage stamp wide + 2 postage stamp long shaped ones while HP / Toshiba might be using the credit card sized cards the last time I checked.

For Dell the drivers works very nice in 3.4 mini / 3.4 Prof. Not sure about the HP / Toshiba's ?

Back to question.
We have posted a few times here in the forums similar posts to your with answers as well as the linux wifi card + driver list excel type page link that can be used for this.

Fixing this by either installing a new wifi card might not be a real solution as the signal + wep / wpa /wpa2 could be a big problem see sticky top of networking "before 3.4e ipw3945 ...." and testing this in windows + fine tuning signal and other stuff could be a real solution to your problem instead of spending money on a wifi card and ending with the same results.

The 43xx is currently the better cards in my opinion from my testing.
Boosting signal also boosts noise in wifi router.
So turning the signal lower to say 65dbm or back to default helped me a lot + testing channel and fining a clear one or clearer one helps a lot.
USA 3 , 9 , and sometimes 6 works well for this.
Older portable land line phones can be very frustrating as it also uses the 2.4ghz spectrum or close to it so ghost frequencies apear on other lower bands that messes with the wifi signal.
Wifi router firmware update can sometimes help especially on linksys braodcom 43xx based routers.

It is just a case of testing all options in the router + your house / office to get best reception in windows and then using the same settings try it in linux.

Wpa / wep /wpa2 needs a good strong clear signal during passcode authentication and does not like too much dropped packets or errors especially in linux , working on fixes for this.

Posting right now on Dell e1705 laptop + 3.4mini + Dell bcm4311mcg with wpa and working fine on default install.

This is not the answer you where looking for but might be worth messing with / exploring to get a actual solution to the problem.

Hope this helps.

[anomaly65]

Thanks for the info. I had the broadcom 4311 up and running, but let's say the difference between that and my wireless network wasn't so hot;-(

I wound up with an Intel 4965agn which seems much happier (not to mention, Intel publishes the specs, broadcom doesn't, making driver development a royal pain for those doing it.)

cheers,
andy