These are the steps I used to get WiFI working on my Dutch Railways surplus
680e and a Netgear MA401 card I had lying around the house:
1
) The Tigerdirect special has been sitting in a box for years, so it will
almost certainly arrive with a dead backup coin cell - you will need to
replace this unless you like constantly clearing out the annoying popup
alerts about it.
2
) The Tigerdirect special ships with ActiveSync 3.0, which did not
work on my PC. The Tigerdirect special ships with a DB9 serial cable,
no USB. I have a Windows ME laptop with a USB to DB9 adapter, and WS 3.0
only looks for a device on COM1 and could not find the HPC, which was
on COM2. Upgrade to the latest version of Activesync that will work on
your PC, from here:
http://www.hpcfactor.com/support/syncsoft/activesync/
USB can figure out the baud rate itself, so set the HPC to 115200.
3
) Download the Prism 2.5 HPC Pro reference driver from here:
http://www.hpcfactor.com/support/cesd/h/0020.asp . The Compaq WL100 driver
*may* work but I was unable to try it
(see below
).
4
) Insert the MA401 into the PCMCIA slot. You will be prompted for the
driver name of the hitherto unknown card. The driver name for the Prism
driver is PRISMNDS.
5
) Do a soft reset just to make sure, if you are prompted again repeat
step 4. The green light on the MA401 should come on or at least start
flashing to signify you have associated.
6
) Now you should be able to open the PRISM control panel and set up
your WiFi parameters: SSID, WEP, etc. I was unable to get WEP to work
with my usual key, due to a stupid bug in the control panel that doesn't
allow entering the alpha-character-based password - it just doesn't
switch over from hex to character text entry. I tried various hex keys:
DEADBEEFDEADBEEFDEADBEEF00, etc, and got nowhere. Finally entering all
zeros in the hex keys worked. Well, it's better than no WEP at all. Of
course disabling WEP worked as a last resort. I was also able to set my SSID
to my house's non-default SSID with no trouble. I had a rinky-dink problem
similar to this with the
Windows ME port of the Prism driver that came with my MA401 - I had to
do something like type spaces after each of the 26-character hex keys
to get it to work.
7
) The WiFi icon in the system tray will switch to green when you have
successfully linked up.
8
) Go to the Network control panel and select "Intersil
PRISM Wireless LAN PC Card"
(not "Intersil PRISM 11Mpbs Wireless LAN PC
Card", which for some reason also shows up on my HPC, probably from an
earlier aborted install
) and see if you can get DHCP to work. :-
( I could
not. This is just like the normal windows TCPIP setup. Enter a static IP,
default router, name servers, etc, for your setup.
9
) Probably after another soft reset, you should have connectivity.
THINGS THAT DO NOT WORK:
- DHCP seems broken, I could just not get the machine to broadcast for
it. So you may or may not be able to go to Starbucks and jack in. This
is not a requirement for me so I did not investigate further.
- Once I had the Prism card recognized, I would not "unrecognize" it, even
after uninstalling the driver. I wanted to switch over to the Compaq
WL100 driver and try it but I was unable to get the HPC to re-prompt for
the driver name. By the way the driver name for the WL100 appears to be
WL100NDS.
-- As a sub note these drivers are in \WINDOWS. CE like other windows
hides DLLs and file name extensions so to see these files you have to
fiddle with the file explorer properties just like on a big windows
machine.
- The Internet Explorer that comes with the 680e is pretty old and won't
render or even connect to a lot of modern sites, particularly if they
require SSL authentication. Gmail is not accessible because of its
heavy reliance on state of the art
(some say "voodoo"
) JavaScript
(unless there is a secret flat-HTML version in there somewhere.
) I could
not even log into Yahoo because the 680e's Explorer doesn't have up to
date ciphers.
- Don't expect huge battery life - these older WiFi cards will suck down
your battery and replacement LiIon 680e batteries are insanely expensive,
so you want to baby that battery.
THINGS THAT DO WORK:
- Well, it's not THAT useful for browsing the web, but I can monitor
local weather at my bedside, without the noise and clatter of a laptop
disk spinning, serious weather nerd that I am.
- My local library has an arrangement with MobiPocket, so I can check out
E-Books and read them on the HPC.
- The Jornada is just plain cool. This is about the most amount of fun
I have had for less than $200 in a long time!
Correction, comments, etc welcome.