Need Opinions on 3945ABG Wireless Card

[Wesley Morgan]

On Fri, 30 Jun 2006, DW wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> Just found out that the evaluation Thnkpad T60 I got (before we order 9 more) 
> has an Intel 3945ABG wireless card for which there is no driver yet. I don't 
> know how easy it would be to order the other T60's w/ alternate 11a/b/g cards 
> (Atheros chipset, which I am told should work), and would rather not rock the 
> boat at this time.

I can't speak for everyone, but the driver for this card in windows XP 
seems to be garbage. It dissociates with the AP all the time, can't 
transfer large amounts of data without losing the connection etc. The only 
way to fix it is to do the "repair" option in the network properties. My 
atheros card was so much more reliable. If I had the option I'd take 
something else.

> I've done a lot of research and have found that Damien Bergamini is still 
> involved in developing the driver for the 3945ABG, although he is focusing 
> his efforts on OpenBSD. On May 14th, he committed it into OpenBSD as the 
> wpi(4) driver.
>
> I suspect that there will be enough of us here who will need support for 
> these 3945 cards, so I'm feeling that even if these laptops show up up next 
> month, and have to sit in boxes for several weeks (probably would anyway, 
> we're so busy with other things), I might be ok as far as having driver 
> support into FreeBSD by that time, even if it's a matter of patching or 
> installing a firmware port (like for iwi and ipw).
>
> What do you all think? What are the chances of getting burnt? Sure we'll 
> still have our old trusty Orinoco pcmcia cards if worse comes to worse, but I 
> really don't want to have to do that again. That's what happened on the T30's 
> when we went to 5.4 and the driver for the cisco aironet was broken.
>
> Since I'm on this subject, I'm still struggling with sound on the T60 -- some 
> have pointed to patches for the Hi Def driver, but it seems that mine is even 
> newer (g), and haven't had success here either. It seems like this is 
> evolving rapidly though, and will probably get better as more folks pick up 
> the newer Thinkpads and others w/ this audio card. Opinions?
>
> Other than those two things, I still think the T60 is a damn fine piece of 
> hardware, and installing 6.1 was easy, X was the easiest ever (Intel graphics 
> accelerator card, which I was nervous about at first, since we always had the 
> widely used radeon cards before, but it xorg picked it up w/ no problems and 
> handled the display superbly).
>
> Thanks again for any input.

-- 
This .signature sanitized for your protection