Wireless on slow Pentium laptop?

I was given an old Dell Latitude CP laptop with 160 Mhz processor, running Win98SE. I would like to set this up to access the Internet from library hotspots, etc. However, I've tried using NetGear and Tenda USB dongles, a Zyxel USB device, and a D-Link cardbus wireless adapter, all unsuccessfully. All of these adapters have worked on other computers. The drivers and utility programs all install normally, Device Manager says that the devices work properly, and the control programs see access points and show wireless signal strength as expected. But they don't establish usable Internet connections; Internet Explorer will not display Web pages, nor can I make telnet connections to my ISP.

I'm beginning to suspect that the 160 Mhz processor is simply not fast enough to handle wireless Internet. Can anyone here confirm or refute that? Are any USB or cardbus wireless adapter models known to be able to make functional Internet connections on computers like this?

--Donald Davis

Reply to
Donald G. Davis
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I don't think processor speed is an issue at all, but a machine of this vintage may not support a cardbus pcmcia card and the USB support may not be compatible either. Check the specs on your adapters and the Dell site for the specs for the laptop.

Reply to
mr.b

My old laptop would also have the same problem, it was 333Mhz with 32Mb RAM - sticking in another 128Mb RAM solved the problem immediately. If you don't have much RAM think about putting some more in. Mine also came with Win98 but I created a cut down version of Win2K using nLite and maybe that could help you wth better/newer driver support for Win2K?

Reply to
elziko

I used to run wireless on a Toshiba Satellite Pentium 133 with Win98SE running on 48mb of RAM using a D-Link 802.11b USB adapter.

Reply to
emtech

so the OP should buy a Toshiba Satellite??? Evidently your hardware worked.

Reply to
mr.b

Not necessarily. That's just what I happened to have at the time.

Yes it did.

Reply to
emtech

Donald G. Davis hath wroth:

It's a 166 or 233 MHz processor.

Basically true. I have a P133 Compaq something laptop that works just fine with a few PCMCIA wireless cards (Orinico Silver) but is a total loss with USB devices. The difference is that with older PCMCIA, much of the protocol processing is done in hardware on the card, while it's done in software (i.e. in the driver) with USB. Just compare the size of the respective drivers.

The DLink Cardbus adapter might be an oddity. It's difficult to tell because you didn't bother supplying the model numbers (or the exact laptop model). DLink has several models with radically different chipsets inside but similar sounding model numbers. The older 16 bit ones did much of the processing on the card and should work. The newer ones are similar to USB and do it all in the driver. I'm rather amazed that you were able to insert a 32bit PC Card/cardbus device into a laptop that only has a 16bit PCMCIA slot.

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

Den Wed, 21 Feb 2007 08:48:08 -0800. skrev Jeff Liebermann:

It's not often that one gets the chance to correct you, Jeff, so I'll pounce on the occasion here ;)

The Dell Latitude CP series of Laptops has got 2 CardBus slot, and not PCMCIA slots. AFAIR they were the first line of Dell laptops that got CardBus. Link to the specs :

formatting link
They are quite good machines, and runs Linux quite well as long as you got the max 128 Mb ram they can take. XP runs on them as well, but don't expect a speeddeamon. I've used the 233 Mhz versions with a Atheros 5213 based PCCard without any problems, under both OS's. Actually the first 60.000+ networks I collected during my wardrives, were collected by that laptop. Later on, I converted one of them into a digital pictureframe, and another one has been made into a selfcontained Wardriveing blackbox, and was installed into a taxicab for a month (netted me 30K+ new networks for my Wigle stats, which is quite good over here in Copenhagen).

J.D. "Dutch" Schmidt Moderator, Netstumbler Forums

Reply to
e-teori

e-teori hath wroth:

Oh, it's easy enough to catch my errors. It happens all too often when I'm lazy or in a rush. Also when I don't bother to check all the details or rely on my rapidly failing memory. I may have a Dell CPi

233MHz in the pile somewhere. It died long ago thanks to a fried motherboard. I could swear that a 32 bit card did't fit, but I'm apparently wrong. I'll double check if I find it.

I stand corrected. (I just hate it when that happens).

I've run XP on machines with 128MBytes just to see what happens. It was a painful experience which I don't want to repeat.

Impressive collection of AP's. I wish I had the time. One of "my never have time to finish" projects is a 2.4GHz direction finder. It should be an interesting addition to the war driving arsenal.

The AR5213 seems to be one of the chips where most of the processing was moved back into hardware. Kinda hard to tell for sure from the description.

"A single driver and firmware code base supports all Atheros chipsets, and provides both backward and forward compatibility with Atheros previous and next-generation multi-standard designs." If that's true, then there's not much the driver has to do as all the hard stuff is done on the chip. That also makes it suitable for underpowered CPU's. Built in PC Card interface so I guess that's supported.

Thanks for the correction.

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

I found what remains of a Latitude CPi D233ST laptop. I cramed a Netgear WG511v2 32 bit card in the slots, and it fits just fine. Just ignore what I previously wrote. (Grumble...)

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

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