[Zxian]

I just figured I'd share a story about a success that I had last night.

A while back I had thought about upgrading my wireless card in my laptop to get better transfer rates over my home network and help with signal strength at school (everyone with a 802.11g card did better than my 802.11b). I contacted Compaq tech support and asked them if I would be able to do the upgrade, since I had hear that some manufacturers had BIOS-locked their wifi cards. The guy on the tech support said that I wouldn't have any troubles.

So I go out and buy Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG miniPCI card** (on sale for a really good price) to upgrade the card that I had in my laptop (2100B). I got home all excited, took out the battery in my laptop and popped off the cover to the miniPCI slot. I removed the old card and insterted the new one (and attached the attenae). I put the battery back in and plugged in the power. Press the power button and...

"104 unsupported wireless network device detected. remove the device and restart. system halted."

WTF....I thought, so I unplugged everything, checked that the card was properly installed and all that jazz. After about 20 minutes of not being able to boot (not even into BIOS), I took out the new card, put in the old one, and was able to get into Windows no problem. I contacted Compaq tech support again, and they then told me that I would need to buy an 802.11g card from them to be able to upgrade. After bitching with them for a good long while (I wouldn't have bought the card if I didn't think it would work), I gave up.


So... that gets me to yesterday. I did some reading and apparently the BIOS-lock only came into effect as of BIOSes released after Jun 2004. Since I bought my laptop in Dec 2003, if I put the original BIOS on there, it should work, right?

For once, the answer to that last question is yes! I was able to boot into Windows, and using my ethernet adapter, download the drivers from Intel for the card. After a bit of work trying to get the drivers and not Intel's ProSet software installed, I was off to the races!

So now I'm sitting in the fast lane! I was able to stream movies over wireless before, but it would usually take a while to find the next keyframe in the movie if I wanted to seek through the movie. Now it usually takes less than half a second.


Hopefully someone else will read this and benefit from it.


**I wanted to buy an Intel card so that I could still keep the Centrino sticker on my laptop without lying...

[ravashaak]

Quote

I contacted Compaq tech support again, and they then told me that I would need to buy an 802.11g card from them to be able to upgrade.

That's why I've always hated Compaqs. From day one they have employed dirty sneaky tricks to make this component or that component just non-standard enough to force their customers into buying their upgrades from Compaq. So, to me at least, your experience comes as little surprise. Although I'll admit that since the Compaq-HP merger, I'd assumed that Compaq would have ceased this practice. I guess old habits die hard.

I never recommend Compaq to anyone because of the reasons above. I want to be able to go buy an upgraded component that should work in my system, and stand a reasonable chance of it actually working when I install it. And of course, I have a major problem dealing with a company that is essentially lying to their customers (so that they may later bilk said customers out of upgrade money).

- Ravashaak

[Zxian]

Well... the wireless card is the only part that I had troubles with. And it was actually HP who started the BIOS-lock on their laptops, and ported that over to the Compaq lineup after the merger.

I just updated my sig with my laptop specs, and the only original parts there are the CPU and video card (since I don't even know where to start for replacing those... ). The RAM and the hard drive went in without a hitch.

Other than this incident, the computer itself has been pretty good. The display doesn't have any dead pixels, and is still reasonably bright. For being a 1.5 year old laptop, it still keeps up pretty well, but that probably has to do with the upgrades I did...