Okay...
I managed to get AW to replace my internal WiFi card over the Christmas holidays and just recently decided to reinstall it. Before I did, I used a lot of the stuff that I had been doing with other people's systems who were encountering the same problems. Long story short... this is what I did.
1) The guys at AW used the grey wire as the main and the black as the aux. Since they cut the grey one so short, I did not have enough slack to actually do what I had done on a lot of other systems, namely make the black wire the primary and the grey wire the secondary. That said, I did the test in two configurations: grey = primary with black = aux and black = primary with grey = not connected.
Best results were with the first configuration.
2) Used as much electrical tape as possible to fully shield the wires from the heatplate. Anyone who took my tips and put them into practice can tell you that you don't use a whole lot of tapr for this.
3) Used an additional piece of electrical tape to form a cushion and elevate what little of the wire could not be wrapped from the heatplate.
The end results were this... the card DID EXHIBIT A MUCH STRONGER SIGNAL than before, but it was still rather weak compared to the majority of mini-PCI cards out there. I used Windows XP as the interface, but plan on trying to use the software included from AW sometime tonight to see if there is a change. That said, the driver for this card is woefully old compared to the technology and I feel that probably plays a large role in the performance issues experienced. Newer drivers are better able to deal with the balance of b/g networks.
Since I have found SEVERAL more Linux modules for this card compared to Windows drivers, I feel that the next phase in this will be to put Linux on this system and test the difference in performance.
I'll keep you posted.
I managed to get AW to replace my internal WiFi card over the Christmas holidays and just recently decided to reinstall it. Before I did, I used a lot of the stuff that I had been doing with other people's systems who were encountering the same problems. Long story short... this is what I did.
1) The guys at AW used the grey wire as the main and the black as the aux. Since they cut the grey one so short, I did not have enough slack to actually do what I had done on a lot of other systems, namely make the black wire the primary and the grey wire the secondary. That said, I did the test in two configurations: grey = primary with black = aux and black = primary with grey = not connected.
Best results were with the first configuration.
2) Used as much electrical tape as possible to fully shield the wires from the heatplate. Anyone who took my tips and put them into practice can tell you that you don't use a whole lot of tapr for this.
3) Used an additional piece of electrical tape to form a cushion and elevate what little of the wire could not be wrapped from the heatplate.
The end results were this... the card DID EXHIBIT A MUCH STRONGER SIGNAL than before, but it was still rather weak compared to the majority of mini-PCI cards out there. I used Windows XP as the interface, but plan on trying to use the software included from AW sometime tonight to see if there is a change. That said, the driver for this card is woefully old compared to the technology and I feel that probably plays a large role in the performance issues experienced. Newer drivers are better able to deal with the balance of b/g networks.
Since I have found SEVERAL more Linux modules for this card compared to Windows drivers, I feel that the next phase in this will be to put Linux on this system and test the difference in performance.
I'll keep you posted.
