Xircom (Intel) CWE-1120 / CEW-1130 and HPC2000

Applies To

• Handheld PC 2000

Overview

The Xircom CWE-1100 series Wireless NIC is a rebranded Cisco 340 / 350 802.11b WiFi adapter. The Jornada 700 series ships with suitable drivers for the NIC but with different branding. This article discuses the availability of a HPC:Factor patch that will allow you to use the drivers found in ROM in conjunction with the Xircom CWE-1100 series adapter.

Downloads

• CreditCard Wireless Ethernet Adapter (802.11b) Driver 4.15

More Info

The Xircom adapter drivers are available from the CESD download centre above. However Jornada 700 series users do not need to install these drivers as the Xircom NIC can make use of the Aironet drivers that shipped in ROM.

Out of the Box the Xircom will not work properly with the Aironet drivers. Users who choose to manually specify aironet.dll as the driver name on card insertion will be presented again with the driver name prompt at the next card insertion.
After approximately 90 ejects the NIC will stop functioning altogether. This is caused by driver registration space in the HPC2000 registry becoming full.
HPC2000 is designed only to be able to accept a maximum of 98 hardware peripheral, including built in hardware such as the touch screen, Infrared and PCMCIA slot. Specifying the aironet.dll manually will cause a driver space to be used up each and every time the NIC is inserted. When removed the driver space is not cleared.

Solution

HPC:Factor has released a patch which will allow the Xircom CWE-1100 series NIC to use the aironet driver successfully, removing the need to type the driver name as well as resolving the driver space issue outlined above.

The small file makes changes to the Plug and Play settings in the device registry for the Xircom NIC. Saving users the need to duplicate the driver files in RAM.

The patch is not released nor supported by Xircom. Use of the patch is at your own risk.

Acknowledgements

With thanks to Rory for working with us on this article.