[MLB-WIRELESS] Old laptops and wireless pcmcia... works?

[Ian Donaldson]

On Wed, 5 May 2004 11:13 am, Donovan Baarda wrote:
> G'day,
>
> I have an old P90 Compaq laptop that currently has a combo
> modem/ethernet PCMCIA card in it. I'm wondering if a machine of this era
> will happily handle all modern wireless cards, or if it needs something
> specific, or it just won't work.
>
> I mentioned the combo card as a possible indication of what it can
> handle. I'm not sure if it is PCMCIA or cardbus... I guess I could try
> and dig up some doco but thought I'd be slack and ask here first.
> Apologies for being lazy :-)

Even quite old laptops have CardBus controllers. Speaking very generally, 
"PCI based" laptops will have CardBus controllers. The trick is telling the 
PCI based laptops from ISA based laptops, as they have no physical slots to 
identify them.

If the machine is running Linux, or can boot Knoppix live CD, then the 
"lspci" command will tell us very quickly if the machine has CardBus 
controllers, as they will appear on the PCI bus.

Otherwise you can grovel around the Windows device manager and see if you 
can work it out. Try viewing "Devices by connection".

Ian
-- 
Ian Donaldson, SA @ MI                       -- ian at myinternet.com.au


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