laptop freezes with pcmcia wifi
 

hi all
got wor lass a hp ze4258 with 768mb ram and a 60gb hard drive (upgraded from original spec).
it doesnt have built in wifi and though it does have the mini pci slot, i couldnt bothered to clart about fitting aerials inside too.
bought a tplink pcmcia extended range wifi card and it installs and runs fine..till it needs to work off the battery.
without the card it works champion off the battery, as soon as the card goes it, within seconds it locks up and needs to be manually restarted via the button.
tried reformatting twice, all drivers up to date, cannot see any problems at all with any hardware.
it still does it even when just sitting idle.
tried the card in another laptop and it ran fine with the battery.
the HP's battery is brand new.

any ideas?

Re: laptop freezes with pcmcia wifi
 

Have you installed he latest drivers?

Re: laptop freezes with pcmcia wifi
 

All drivers updated from manufacturers sites after reinstalling XP.
did the whole lot.

Re: laptop freezes with pcmcia wifi
 

Faulty wi-fi card?

I had a belkin card that locked up all 3 laptops I tried it in :(

Re: laptop freezes with pcmcia wifi
 

the card doesnt seem fautly cos it works perfectly in the laptop when the psu is plugged in, just not off the battery

Re: laptop freezes with pcmcia wifi
 

Do you have some kind of power management profile setup in XP that is disabling/ putting to sleep the PCMCIA slots when running off battery?

Re: laptop freezes with pcmcia wifi
 

i dont think so, its set on minimal power management or laptop profile

Re: laptop freezes with pcmcia wifi
 

Bring up Device manager

(control panel > system > device manager)

right click on the network card and bring up its properties.
It may give you some settings specific to the card one of them may be a power saving mode, try turning that off.

Sorry if i'm not explaining it very well, i'm on OSX at the moment so can't look myself to make sure the setting is where i think it is.

Re: laptop freezes with pcmcia wifi
 

I used to have the same problem with my Compaq n1020v. I went to the hp website and downloaded the 'operating system enhancements' which seemed to sort out the problem. From then I could use a pcmcia card without the laptop freezing up on boot-up. Try here. Hope it helps.

Re: laptop freezes with pcmcia wifi
 

got the power saving turned off in device manager and all the drivers on already from the hp site.
could it be the hard disk?