7.

Revised January 28 2005

A helpful reader submitted these links to an support forum thread that provide information on some HP notebooks (nc6000) that are picky about the WLAN cards that they allow to be installed. He also reported that the nc8000 has the same problem.

Revised February 22 2005
Engadget pointed the way to a couple of articles that have more details on notebooks that are fussy about which mini-PCI WLAN cards they accept. This article has info on X40 and R31 IBM ThinkPads and contains info describing how to hack the BIOS to get other cards to work. This article is a shorter summary of what needs to be done, but has no details. Note that these procedures assume you are comfortable with hex editors and could leave you with a dead notebook!

Another helpful reader offered this tip for Toshiba notebook owners:
I recently tackled adding a wireless mini-pci card to my notebook. I found an Intel 2200BG mini-PCI card on eBay and installed it in my Toshiba Satellite 1905. It turns out that pins 11-16 of the mini-PCI spec are user-defined (hardware on off, activity, etc.) Although card and slot were mini-PCI, Toshiba uses the pins differently and I could not get the radio turned on. Covering pins 11 and 13 with tape solved this.