TechoLiO
A plethora of all things technical.

You all probably know about getting wi-fi in your laptop. But an add on pc-card, adding a terrific tumor sticking out the side of your sleek laptop. The antenna!

Some laptops do it better and have it built in, using a pair of antennas in the cover. The cover being vertical, and the pair making a "diversity antenna" help the performance usually. Diversity here meaning two antennas are used to pick up signals better (ot that PC term we're all tired of hearing!)

Go Internal

If you have a laptop without it built in, you may have a chance to add it anyway! Dell makes quite a few models with the antennas ready.

How do you know? First, check to see if your laptop takes a mini-pci card. It's a little rectangular card that is used for a variety of things, one being wi-fi cards. If your laptop has this slot, open it up and see if it's not already being used. If not, you're halfway there!

Second, right where that mini-pci would go, look for a pair of wires with small round connectors (1/8" or so) on them. Those are the antenna connectors. If you have those, you're good to go!

Where to get one

Don't let them fool ya, mini-pci boards are standard. The wi-fi cards are too. If you can find a wi-fi card that is mini-pci, and you have this setup, it's likely going to work fine.

First, decide to go 802.11g for the faster 54 megabit rate. Why not, you deserve it! Plus it's not much more anyway now.

I was going to give you a cool way to get a board cheap. One of the LinkSys 54g routers, (and likely others) simply have a mini-pci card right in them, so if you got one cheap you could hack it apart and steal the card. And use the butchered case for, I don't know... a planter.

But I recently found Dell selling mini-pci 802.11g cards for just 50 bucks! Well you can't beat that. If you read the description of it, it only mentions current Dell laptops. But I got it for my unlisted inspiron 4100, and it works like a charm. Actually it works like a 802.11b card. The model is the truemoble 1300.

If you have other cards that are recommended or anything else to add, just email.