So here it is, my brand new notebooks with all the bells and whistles I’ve been missing with ‘that other old notebook’ while traveling. The last area in which I expected problems during installation was the wireless LAN card, Centrino label on it and all.
Yes, I still do believe in the message of some advertisements 🙂 The WLAN card worked at first for simple web page downloads and other things but failed whenever I tried to do some more advanced stuff like Skype or video streaming. So o.k. maybe it doesn’t like my access point. No big deal, got a second one for testing purposes. With that one it was even worse, lost connection every couple of seconds. Next I looked at the driver version for the Intel 2200BG driver (802.11b/g) and saw that it was from 2004… No wonder it doesn’t work… Next, I went to the notebook manufacturer’s homepage. Surprise, surprise, they still offer that same driver for download. O.k., been there before, so I downloaded the original driver from Intel, it’s just 80 MB (no kidding…). That one is from 2005. After installation, the WLAN works just fine.
Intel, wake up! Manufacturers that put your Centrino logo on a notebook should be forced to put recent drivers on the device. Lucky me I knew what I was doing. What about all those ‘ordinary users’ out there that can’t fix such a problem? They should not even have it!