[geeks] Wireless PC Cards - possible?

[Mike F]

Micah R Ledbetter wrote:

>I've acquired for free a Compaq LTE 5150 laptop (100MHz Pentium, heh) and docking station. I'd like to take it wireless, but I've read that this machine can't handle the CardBus PCMCIA cards, and requires PC Card PCMCIA cards... the way I understand it, PC Card was first, and CardBus was a later standard that was more like PCI.
>
>I've seen conflicting reports on the web. Reports of people turning these things into wireless access points, as well as reports stating that there is no wireless card that will work in this machine. Can anyone shed some light on this for me? Anyone gone wireless in a non-CardBus laptop, or researched it and found it to be impossible?
>
>Thanks for any help.
>
> - Micah
>  
>
I have a Compaq WL110 PC Card (apparently a rebadged Orinoco card)
running in a Toshiba Satellite T2105CS - 486/50, 28MB RAM. I have it
dual-booting FreeBSD 4.11 and Windows 95, and it handles both perfectly
other than X 4.x under FreeBSD (X 3.3.6 used to work fine.) I got the
WL110 off of ebay for about $30 a few years ago because I knew it was a
16-bit PCMCIA card. This card has worked perfectly for me - range is
good, and driver support seems to be decent - but I think any
16-bit/non-Cardbus card should work for you, just make sure to look up
any docs you can find for potential purchases.

- Mike