Successfully replaced the wifi in my laptop. Factory card was an intel 5100 which is a piece of garbage. I put in an atheros AR928X stolen from my Eeepc 1000he.. I lose 5ghz capability but it wasnt worth it for the poor 2.4ghz performance of the intel. Now, you could be right next to the AP and have full bars, but still poor performance. "Bursty" would be the best word for it I guess. I could fire up streaming radio and watch the wifi light flash consistently for awhile, but then it would just stop. Unsurprisingly, the stream would then be interrupted. I dont know if it was some sort of power play to save juice, or what. It would still do it in Max Performance mode and Max Power Save mode. It would just be more often in the latter. Copying a file over the wifi would show a similar throughput issue. It could be chugging along at 5MB/s then drop like a stone for several seconds before coming back up. Normally I like intel stuff, but this card was disappointing.
Unfortunately, it isnt as straight forward as just popping out the old card and throwing in the new one on a thinkpad. They have a BIOS whitelist of acceptable cards. So it errors out and refuses to boot until the offending card is removed. But, it isnt too difficult to find a modded BIOS on the interweb. I did so and risked bricking the thing, but now I dont have to worry about it again. If I want to get a different card sometime later to get 5ghz back, it will be no problem. Just pick one.
Unfortunately, it isnt as straight forward as just popping out the old card and throwing in the new one on a thinkpad. They have a BIOS whitelist of acceptable cards. So it errors out and refuses to boot until the offending card is removed. But, it isnt too difficult to find a modded BIOS on the interweb. I did so and risked bricking the thing, but now I dont have to worry about it again. If I want to get a different card sometime later to get 5ghz back, it will be no problem. Just pick one.
