29 September, 2007

GRT-815M & 3Com® OfficeConnect® Wireless 108Mbps 11g XJACK PC Card

Since the model comes without a wireless card, this post might not be so relevant but I hope to be at least useful. There is a mini PCI card slot that one can put in a wireless card, but all the available options were (still are) quite expensive. Because of all this I have decided to buy this particular model PC Card (PCMCIA): 3Com® OfficeConnect® Wireless 108Mbps 11g XJACK PC Card Product #: 3CRXJK10075.

To make the long story short, after installing the card and the drivers I have of course updated to the latest available drivers on the vendor's web site. The wireless client utility that comes with the package is nothing special, quite boring but I guess there are worse and at least it works... sort of...! I got sporadic and random Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) that was pointing the ar5211.sys driver as the cause for the crash. Needless to, say that reinstalling the drivers was not fixing the issue. So I have started to dig the Net for solution and... ...I have found nothing official.

Well, what I found is an unofficial distribution for the Atheros chipset based cards. I have always second thoughts about unofficial software, but in this particular situation I did not have much choice left. Anyway, googling for or visiting this address ftp://lizzi555.dyndns.org/Download/WLAN/Atheros/ will help you to find and install newer version of the driver that will solve the crashing problem and a new wireless client utility that is way way better than the one from 3Com.