Internal Wifi Card or the PCMCIA Wifi card (that sticks out kinda)

Generally the internal works better than the PCMCIA cards. You might want to check if its properly seated and the antenna is correctly connected. After that, you might want to do some troubleshooting to see what's up. Might want to check with your Tech Support.

Check the power settings and make sure it's not set to power saving or something like that. Supposedly that lowers the transfer rate and I guess could cause you to lose the connection maybe? Also, make sure your WiFi settings are set properly. I was having a similar problem at first but it was because I incorrectly set my laptop. I get better reception than all the other wifi users at school that have USB or PCMCIA cards.

You said you got the minicard free? Does that mean you installed it yourself or did the retailer do it?

Some computers don't come with the antenna (sp?) equiped unless you order it at the time of the laptop's manufacture. HP did that with some of the cheaper laptops (don't know if they still do that.)

sometimes the built in LEDS do nothing, even though the thing is working. Check the case manufacturers drivers site and see what they say.

I have an asus m6n and the original shipped drivers gave it shaky wifi signal. I upped the bios, and all pertinent intel drivers and suddenly I get great signal, all LEDs and switches work. So go figure, it tends to be sw sometimes.

Not all internal wifi cards and wifi routers play well together either. Brands are supposed to work perfectly, standards are supposed to be the same brand to brand, but that is sometimes far from the real world case.

Good luck!

Eric

Mm... not necessarily.

The bios has to be hard programmed to interface with a certain brand of card. For me, the older asus bios worked with the intel 2100 wireless card, which is only the b freq. I got the 2200, which does both the b/g and asus supported. Once I had the new bios in, the newest hotkey utility in and hardware drivers, and the new 2200 drivers and proset utility, it all worked. Bear in mind that asus had to program all that func in to thier driver set to have that work. A good way to tell is if the OEM ships thier laptops with the card you have now. If not, then it wont work.

Like techsupport told me, when I was trying to figure this out...
"Why do you even need that to work?" LOL

Pretty sure that guy got in some deep doodoo when I reported his oh so helpful attitude to sales. Hehe. Then I figured it out on my own.

Moral of the story- screw techsupport, you can figure it out. ha!

Eric

Likewise to what Eric is saying, with the M6n I tried a Dell card (b/g) and while the signal was decent - it worked really well with a D-Link - 624, but it woud cause my USR 8054 to lock up after a few hours use.
Now I'm using the Intel 2200 Pro (B/G) and the USR doesn't lock up anymore and the signal is still pretty good.
However, the on/off switch did not work with the Dell, but it does now with the Intel card.
The thing with most of the on off switch's ( when you're buying a barebone -either directly or through company that is putting it together for you) is that most of the on off switches are only meant to work with the full centrino platform - PM, and Intel Pro card (calexico I think its called) . Untill recently there was no Intel B/G card, so re-sellers buiding on a barebones machine would just outfit it with any other b/g card in order to stay competitive. However the extra feature ( on/off hotkey) would generally not work, as the barebones maker only really supports the Centrino platform.
That is why originally with the M6N the button only worked with the Intel 2100. When the 2200 came out, asus updated their drivers/bios to support any changes that might have been required for the newer centrino b/g option - but the on/off will still probably never be supported for other manu. mini-pci cards. ( I didn't really expect the dell card to work in that respect with the M6N, but I though it might 'cause dell notebooks also use Fn + F2 to toggle the wireless state on/off - just like the M6N.