I th nk th r 's s meth g wr ng w th th s c nn cti n!
I tried to get WPA working on our network one day last week. I had to upgrade the access point's firmware to get it to play ball, and then I had to update the Windows driver to even have the option of turning WPA on even though the help for said driver delighted in telling me all about it (just not how to turn it on). Sadly the Linux prism54 driver doesn't seem to support WPA despite initial appearances, and the other two drivers I tried didn't play ball either. So back to WEP, then.
I got an irritated phone call on Thursday afternoon from bopeepsheep, whose net connecton had suddently stopped working for no apparent reason (and this was of course my fault for having downloaded new drivers without warning her the other day - how was I to know before installing that they had completely changed the user interface?). It started working again about ten minutes later after she reset the machine, but it became intermittent again during the evening.
On Friday when I came home I noticed that the Wi-Fi cards had been switched. "Well, my connection has been absolutely fine ever since I switched them", said bopeepsheep.
It wasn't long before my connection started playing up. Sometimes it stops with both lights on and if I leave it for ten minutes the kernel sends a reset and it picks up again. Other times it appears to be working fine but half the traffic gets dropped. Le sigh. It seems rather hot when I take it out, but then it doesn't help that the PCMCIA slots are in the hottest part of the laptop.
I poked about on 3Com's web site and it seems that this card comes with a 30 day warranty. Way to have confidence in your products! As it happens, the card is a bit over two years old.
So anyway, any recommendations for a decent Wi-Fi PCMCIA card? Preferably one which has drivers in recent 2.6.x kernels and which supports WPA (via wpa_supplicant or otherwise).