Re: [Hampshire] USB WiFi for WPA Network

2009/7/27 James Ashburner <hantslug@???>:
> Alan Pope wrote:
>> 2009/7/27 Paul Stimpson <paul@???>:
>>
>>> I'm pretty sure I've got a spare Intel IPW2200 mini-PCI card if it fits and the BIOS in the machine will recognise it.
>>>
>>>
>>
>> A friend of mine has an HP laptop which had a nasty non-free mini-PCI
>> wifi device which was a royal pain to get working. I had a spare
>> IPW2200 one which we put in. Initially it didn't work because for some
>> reason the hardware kill switch was wired up differently for the
>> original mini-PCI device than the Intel one I supplied.
>>
>> The solution, scrape off one of the tracks from the Intel card !
>>
>> So don't be surprised if a card doesn't work right off the bat, even
>> if it's a nice open friendly card like the intel ones.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Al.
>>
>>
> The Toshiba Satellite Pro A30 exhibits this behaviour. I took the
> slightly less drastic route of putting a thin strip of masking tape over
> the contact :)
>
> James
>

This all seems rather drastic. I could probably reverse engineer this
in about 30mins if I had an example laptop. The RF kill switch is not
exactly a difficult feature to reverse engineer. One just presses the
switch, and then see what IO the windows driver makes as a result.