Smallest WLAN card running on Netbook Pro?

Hello!

After checking the page http://www.pocketpcfaq.com/peripherals/pccardwirelesslan.htm I decided to buy a 3Com 802.11b PCMCIA card with XJACK antenna. The card looks really nice and fits into the PC card slot of my Netbook Pro. But obviously the CE drivers are outdated and don't run on my device!
I checked several pages and also contacted 3Com support, but it looks like there aren't any available drivers for CE.NET 4.x!

Does anyone has an idea to get this card running? As far as I know it is based on ATMEL chipset.
Or are there any other PCMCIA or CompactFlash cards with small antennas?

I also have a CISCO WLAN card which runs without any problems, but I just don't like the big size of its antenna...



Edited by Manolito 2006-05-04 2:55 AM

I like the Socket CF Wifi card on my Netbook Pro.

I'm using the DLink 660W SD WiFi Card. Works nice!
You only have to install the WM2003 drivers and this baby flies on my netBook Pro.

the senao SL-2511CF (cf wlan card) has a smaller and slimmer antenna than the dlink 660

Well, I sold my 3Com card and bought a Spectec SDW-820 - world's smallest
WLAN SDIO card!

Spectec website

It works fine on my NETBOOK PRO with the PPC2003 drivers!

Edited by Manolito 2006-05-19 11:04 AM

Yep I use that card on my Sig3 (and my PPC phone). The driver uses zero config so it works without any special dll files.

Note for sig3 the driver files OS version has to be changed to 4.1. Netbook Pro doesn't need the change because it's 4.2 already

the bad thing is the bsquare phh has ce.net 4.1 but the spectec driver and zeroconfig don't play nice there. zeroconfig does work with it, but is behaving strangely... the pretec was even worse, i think bsquare (the OEM) must've screwed up something with their implementation of zeroconfig..
of course there are workarounds for both cards.

So, you are happy with the Spectec SDIO wifi card on your Netbook Pro? I currently use a Socket CF Wifi card and CF Bluetooth card (both leftover from my Jornada 720), so I am forced to use a 1 GB SD card for storage. I find that it takes maybe 10 seconds for the Netbook Pro to reinitialize the SD card when the Netbook Pro comes out of suspend, which causes many apps that run from the SD card to puke/crash when coming out of suspend. I have never encountered this problem when using CF for storage, so would love to move to a SD Bluetooth or Wifi card to free a CF slot.

At the beginning I was happy, but meanwhile I'm not anymore...

The driver seem to crash sometimes. After a few minutes of browsing I get strange error messages and the card does not respond anymore. I tried every power saving setting (disabled/slow/fast) of the Spectec driver, but it doesn't run for a long time like it should.

So, I'm going to sell this card again...

hmm that's strange. I don't have much problem with it and Sig3. The worst thing I get is dropped connections, especially when the card is blocked by my hands etc, which is easily fixed by repositioning the device.

Other than that it's always worked fine. And of course it works even better when I use it with my PPC phone, which has the SD slot at the top, so the antennae gets a good position

Given the small size (prohibiting much of an antenna, even at 802.11b/g frequencies) of an SD card and the fact that SD card tended to be inserted horizontally on HPC devices, it doesn't surprise me that they get poor performance. I would still like to know if anyone has found one that they like.

I usually use a Socket CF Wifi card in my Netbook Pro, but when I need a bit more oomph, I will use an Orinoco Silver hooked up to a PCB Blade antenna or a small 8 db panel.