Route44
Posts: 12,015 +82
This Toshiba Tecra S1 Laptop is a 6-7 years old with a Centrino M 1.4 MHz cpu, ATI 9000 graphics, and running XP Pro with SP3. I did a number of clean ups and tweaks and upgrades, i.e. two gigs of PC2100 and new harddrive.
The wireless card is only a/b which is slow. So installed a Belkin G MIMO PCMCIA Card over a year ago and disabled the Intel wireless. (Did not use this laptop a lot but my home is now wireless with a Access Point N connected via ethernet wire to my wired Linksys G Router).
In the begiing the Belkin connected to the full 54mbs and sometimes a little less. But eventually it began to freeze my whole system. Here are the cliff notes.
1. Never inserted the card until all drivers loaded.
2. Inserted card and let the firewall and antivirus do their job; if not system froze.
3. Believing it might be the Avast and it's a) real time protection and b) attempts to update, I temporarily paused the Avast.
4. This seemed to work but if I tried to connect too soon the Online Armor firewall would freeze. So I learned to wait and then I could connect to internet.
5. The Belkin always found the AP but even then it could freeze and I couldn't open anything; not even to shut-down unless I pressed the power button.
6. Sometimes I could get online for a bit but then it would freeze.
7. Came to find out one problem is that Windows would automatically switch from using the Belkin Utility back to it's own utility. Even if I save to Belkin Utility it doesn't always stay.
8. After a lot of having to use the power button to shut down the system I decided to renable the Intel wireless and I can access at the blistering speed of 11 mbs.
* Anyone have any advice/steps for me to be able to use the Belkin G only? It works really well but it doesn't seemed to be liked by my system. Can't figure out why it is freezing. two weeks ago it was flying on a college campus' (unsecured) WiFi (yes I have since run malwarebytes and antivirus scan).
Thanks.
The wireless card is only a/b which is slow. So installed a Belkin G MIMO PCMCIA Card over a year ago and disabled the Intel wireless. (Did not use this laptop a lot but my home is now wireless with a Access Point N connected via ethernet wire to my wired Linksys G Router).
In the begiing the Belkin connected to the full 54mbs and sometimes a little less. But eventually it began to freeze my whole system. Here are the cliff notes.
1. Never inserted the card until all drivers loaded.
2. Inserted card and let the firewall and antivirus do their job; if not system froze.
3. Believing it might be the Avast and it's a) real time protection and b) attempts to update, I temporarily paused the Avast.
4. This seemed to work but if I tried to connect too soon the Online Armor firewall would freeze. So I learned to wait and then I could connect to internet.
5. The Belkin always found the AP but even then it could freeze and I couldn't open anything; not even to shut-down unless I pressed the power button.
6. Sometimes I could get online for a bit but then it would freeze.
7. Came to find out one problem is that Windows would automatically switch from using the Belkin Utility back to it's own utility. Even if I save to Belkin Utility it doesn't always stay.
8. After a lot of having to use the power button to shut down the system I decided to renable the Intel wireless and I can access at the blistering speed of 11 mbs.
* Anyone have any advice/steps for me to be able to use the Belkin G only? It works really well but it doesn't seemed to be liked by my system. Can't figure out why it is freezing. two weeks ago it was flying on a college campus' (unsecured) WiFi (yes I have since run malwarebytes and antivirus scan).
Thanks.
