On 19/06/13 15:42, Jason White wrote:
Toby Corkindale <toby.corkindale@strategicdata.com.au> wrote:
That's nice, that's a dual-band card. However my laptop came with the much newer Intel Centrino N 2300 chip, which is not dual-band. Apart from it obviously not seeing the channels, it's also confirmed by checking Intel's page.
The specs for the Lenovo X230 (which is the newest model similar to my current laptop) suggest that the purchasor has the opton of several different wireless cards - all Intel.
It would be interesting to know whether one card can be replaced by another on the "supported" list and whether Lenovo will supply this (at a price, of course).
You can indeed swap one card for another on the list, as long as you purchase it direct from Lenovo, so that it has the modified PCI IDs. However for my laptop, none of the options available met my criteria -- I could either have a poorly-supported Broadcom chipset, or the single-band Intel chipset. The better Intel chips weren't available. Also it's worth noting that a wireless chip that costs about $13 on ebay (new) costs about $95 from Lenovo direct, which is a pretty hefty markup.
Mine is not a new laptop, so I would expect more recent models to support the 5GHz band too.
Yeah, that was an assumption I made as well. My old Lenovo came with a dual-band wireless card too. I am quite surprised Lenovo ship this laptop with a low-spec wireless card.
What I find quite ugly is the way they've BIOS-locked the machine to not allow you to upgrade it.
I agree - that's very bad practice. The only reasons that come immediately to mind would be (1) trying to make you purchase cards through them or to upgrade the laptop; or (2) some sort of regulatory issue in one or more of their markets. As I recall, wireless regulators in Japan are particularly strict, but they're not the only example.
Who knows.. Apparently HP do this too, but not really anyone else, and they all seem to sell stuff around the world fine. As for adjusting the PCI IDs.. It seems that on some old intel cards, you could write to the EEPROM to do so, with some patches to the drivers. The modern cards still have the EEPROM reading functions in the driver, so maybe I can find a spec and add the EEPROM writing function back in again. I've ordered a $13 card so will give it a go; otherwise I guess I just have to fall back to using a lame USB adaptor.