3Com 3CRWE737A-JP Wireless PC Card

After consulting the hardware guide on this site, I bought a 3Com 3CRWE737A PC card for my NEC 880, and can't get it to work at all (system recognizes that a card has been inserted, but the lights on it never light up and it won't connect to anything).

In looking at the actual model number on the card, it is listed as 3CRWE737A-JP, which a Google search reveals is the model for Japan. The seller insists that the Japan model has been tested and works in the US. I can't independently verify this through searching, and it certainly isn't working in my system.

So . . . two questions:

1. Should this card -- made for the Japanese market -- work in my system?

2. If it should work, what trouble-shooting steps should I take next? (I've followed the 3Com installation instructions painstakingly to the letter...)

I'm running CE Pro SP1 (with the NEC SP1 installed).

Thanks!

Rick
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Moved to HPC Pro Technical Support

Have you updated the firmware of the NIC at all?
You installed using ActiveSync, not something kookie with the CAB?

I found no firmware updates on their support site:

http://www.3com.com/products/en_US/detail.jsp?tab=support&sku=3CRWE737A&pathtype=purchase

And I did install using ActiveSync 3.8, just as they require in their documentation.

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Back to my original question: Should a card made for the Japanese market work in my US NEC 880?

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I imagine that the firmware will be on the ac20cd.exe file for the host system.

Yep, that's the one I installed.

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The CE drivers are ac20ce.exe. The host CD image is ac20cd.exe.

The way I read the documentation, ac20cd.exe creates the entire installation CD (which includes the drivers found in ac20ce.exe). In other words, ac20ce.exe is a SUBSET of ac20cd.exe.

In fact, extracting ao20cd.exe creates a large collection of folders which appears to contain drivers for a number of different Windows versions. The folder WinCE appears to contain all of the files which are contained in ac20ce.exe.

This is, of course, needlessly confusing, although I'm sure 3Com thought it was doing someone a favor by offering just the drivers separate from the entire CD contents. Oh, that they had chosen different names for these files...

The installation progresses smoothly, including all of the steps on the 880. Yet the card simply never comes to life. The minimal network settings available on the portable make it hard to know what to do next to troubleshoot this.

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Yes, I agree completly their system is needlessly confusing.
I want you to be sure though that you have the 2.0 firmware on it as the 2.0 drivers may require it.

This may require using the card in a laptop, and flashing it / checking it is working.

I cannot find any specific information on the -JP, or drivers, so I assume that it is the same as the generic version - but that is an assumption.
If the -JP works in a laptop using the generic's drivers, then it's probable that the CE ones will work with the -JP.
Is all I can think to suggest right now.

Sorry to say, but I don't have a laptop (or any other device) in which to try the card. But I do have more info:

The tray icon for the adapter on the 880 offers a menu I had not previously discovered. When I select "Find AirConnect Adapter" from that little menu, I get the message "An AirConnect Adapter could not be found."

If I pop the card out and reseat it, I get a dialogue titled "Unidentified PCCard Adapter" which asks me to "Enter the name of the driver for this PCCard:" and offers "Network card in socket 1" as the default. (It isn't a drop-down, but a text field to type into.)

I tried typing the AirConnect driver name as it appears on the Control Panel, but nothing changed.

I suppose it could be a dead card.
I suppose the socket could be bad (this was a refurbished machine).
I suppose this could be related to the -JP in the model number.
I suppose this could just be me in a clueless state.

[Sound of hairs being ripped out of head. ]

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The cards driver name is WE7X7ND4.dll