Hi, sorry for the slow posting, but here is a cool little mod I did the other day with my best mate Shakey!
I have a NC10 netbook with a Wireless G PCI-E card, I recently got a WRT300N and so ordered a Intel 5300 wireless N card and extra antenna. So this is a few pictures of fitting. I forgot to take some screenshots of inSSIDer before I changed the card, and after as I still playing with the settings.
This is the Intel 5300 I got from ebay for £10, from hong kong. Took 15-16days I think but its here!
Getting the back off wasn’t to hard. This guide was great!
This is the old WiFi card, with the 2 antennas placed around the screen. You remove the antennas and unscrew the card. Its flips up and you pull it out, really easy!
This is the new Wifi card in place and the new antenna placed around the HDD, I had to move it nearer to the HDD after this picture as there was a screw hole under it.
The results were.. not great. The signal is better, but not anywhere close to N, I was looking for range more than speed but got neither. XP reports 54mbps and inSSIDer reports it been 18mbps from the 300N, even tho its set to G=6mbps and N=108mbps (To test it) so I don’t think its reading right. I will have to run my own tests, but for now it is better than the old card but not worth the money. It may be the router tho. The router is a WRT300N V2 so no DD WRT at the moment (And there hasn’t been for a while) and so settings are a bit restricted. Still was a fun project to try and meant a cool look in to the NC10.
#1 by Subseeter on September 10th, 2009
Nice Laptop. how much faster is it with the new wireless N card? and how much further can it go?
#2 by admin on September 10th, 2009
You know the answer to that. Gman on GVL did the same to his laptop and got a lot better results so I am just going to try some more things. Its getting it to use wirelesss N that’s the problem.