Does anyone know if you can upgrade TC1100 from

[y2smc]

Does anyone know if you can upgrade TC1100 from Intel PRO/Wireless 2100 to Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG mini PCI card? 1.0GB Pentium M model.

[eversor]

No you can't. At least no with just any Card. You will need an original HP 2200 Card (which offers nothing more than the original intel card besides the 300% markup in the price tag)

[davros]

Actually, you can! And I did!

It's surprisingly easy..but just a bit scary for a linux newbie like me :)

Anyways, the process is as described here...on HP's own support sit :) Gotta love that! http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/f...hreadId=567021

I'll post it below also....

I have a solution thanks to whiteheat and druid cz from x1000 forums that allows you to use any Intel Pro Wireless 2200BG card inside your HP laptop.

Before, I received the error 104: unsupported wireless card, now my NC8000 laptop will boot perfectly. Now you can buy your card for < £25.00 instead of HP's £60 + vat + p&p.

First off if you don't have linux installed you will need to go to www.knoppix.org and download KNOPPIX_V3.8.2-2005-05-05-EN.iso, then burn the cd

You need to have the card install during the boot sequence so, have your laptop open and bootup, when you see the boot:_ line insert the card then press enter. Knoppix will autodetect the card & the bios wont complain.

Once knoppix has booted:

Click on the penguin on the taskbar and select "Root Shell", then the following command (from now on any line that begins with a # is a command to be typed at the Root prompt:
#iwconfig
You will get a list of ethernet adapters, eth0, eth1 etc. The wireless one should be quite obvious from the text displayed after it with all the wireless parameters!
#ethtool -e ethX
Obviously replace the 'X' with the index of your wireless card you found above.
You will get a hex dump of the 256 bytes of EEPROM data.
Note: There is nothing dangerous in the above steps at all.

If you want to writing to your EEPROM (You can seriously screw your card up so be careful ):

#mkdir /usr/tmp
#cd /usr/tmp
#wget http://www.geocities.com/sonyirclib/ipw2200.tar.gz
>

N.B. This file has already been patched to allow writing to the eeprom

#tar xvzf ipw2200.tar.gz
#cd ipw2200-1.0.3
#sh unload
#sh load

Now all that you need to do is write to the eeprom. If your card is from Europe:

#ethtool -E eth0 magic 0x2200 offset 0x8 value 0xf6
#ethtool -E eth0 magic 0x2200 offset 0x9 value 0x12
#ethtool -E eth0 magic 0x2200 offset 0xa value 0x3c
#ethtool -E eth0 magic 0x2200 offset 0xb value 0x10

If it is from the US:

ethtool -E eth0 magic 0x2200 offset 0x8 value 0xf5
ethtool -E eth0 magic 0x2200 offset 0x9 value 0x12
ethtool -E eth0 magic 0x2200 offset 0xa value 0x3c
ethtool -E eth0 magic 0x2200 offset 0xb value 0x10

N.B. the -E must be uppercase for writing to work.

Now reboot your computer and you should no longer get the error 104...!

For more details see: http://www.x1000forums.com/index.php?showtopic=8737


Note that Knoppix would not fully boot for me on my TC1100, as it did not have the usb drivers at that point...so the solution was to create a FAT32 partition, just a small one will do, say 1 gig, and copy the contents of the Knoppix CD on to it and when you boot from the Knoppix cd, it'll find that partition and boot from there - Sweet! Then follow the instructions as per above :)

Oh, you'll find the Pro driverrs for the 2200bg on the HP support site...so just grab them from there install and presto!

Hope that helps somepeople save some $$$$'s

Dav.