Well supported wireless card for Lenovo T520

[Warner Losh]

On Jun 19, 2011, at 8:24 AM, Maciej Milewski wrote:

> On Sunday 19 of June 2011 14:16:32 John Baldwin wrote:
>> You might want to make sure that your laptop will accept a different
>> wireless adapter.  I tried to replace the Broadcom WIFI adapter in an HP
>> netbook and the system refused to POST with an Atheros WIFI adapter.
>> Apparently the BIOS would check the PCI ID of the adapter and only
>> booted if it was the Broadcom adapter.  (The message it output during
>> POST actually said "restore valid WIFI nic" or some such.)  I resorted
>> to using ndis(4) (though it looks like the Linux equivalent of bwn(4)
>> supports my adapter now, so maybe someday I'll get to use bwn(4)).
> 
> In such case there are options to find a card which was made specific to 
> manufacturer or find the patched bios(or do this by self but that may be very 
> dangerous). I had such situation and went the whitelist way with my Lenovo 
> laptop and I have no more problem with incompatible wireless(wwan and wlan) 
> devices. The two computer manufacturers who are doing such security of their 
> profit are HP and Lenovo. I don't know if others are doing that too.

The other option is to change the ID in the BIOS (hardish) or get a atheros card that you can change the ID for (less hard: google is your friend ehre).

Warner