UKC

My laptop has been playing up recently, crashing and then rebooting having lost the wifi card (not found in device manager etc.) I've swapped the WiFi adapter out for one I had in an old laptop long dead ( about 6 years old) and it seems to be working at the moment but the one I removed had 2 antenna attachments and the one from the old laptop only one.
Any idea what I'll be missing out on using the old card with the single antenna? otherwise, any ideas what spec I need to take not of that will affect the performance? I don't want to put everything back together only to find the problems later.

Thanks,

Gethin,

In reply to gethin_allen:

Number of antennas are less important than the overall spec. If it is 6 years old then good chance it wont support the latest standards and so run slower.

In reply to gethin_allen:

The 2 antennae are probably just a diversity set-up - normally at 90 degrees to each other to provide a different reception level and the software pics the best signal at anyone time.

It means essentially that it will struggle to get a good signal a bit more, especially when it is moving in relation to the wifi hub. Shouldn't be a problem unless you are miles from your router.

As Kevin said it's less likely to support newer protocols being that old

In reply to balmybaldwin:

I'm wondering how old the card in the new laptop is after seeing that the driver was dated feb 2013 despite the fact that the laptop was new in early 2014.
It's seriously irritating, the laptop just had to start causing trouble a few months after the warranty ran out and when I ran the HP WiFi driver repair tool the thing then refused to boot, and after it had "refreshed" itself it now boots into a OS selection screen showing 2 identical OS installations on the same drive volume.

In reply to gethin_allen:
The 'new' laptop must be incredibly old to not have built in wireless. That's been the standard for like the past ~8 years. Number of antennas doesn't matter. Date of the driver doesn't mean anything either, maybe you just haven't updated it since then. Maybe the driver doesn't need updating as there's no changes been made to it by the manufacturers.

In reply to Removed User:
both the old and new laptop effectively have "built in" Wi Fi, but as with pretty much every other manufacturer they have third party miniature PCIe cards inside them that can be swapped and changed.
If you have a laptop and take one of the little hatches off the back you'll likely find a little PCB about 1 inch square with a little antenna clipped onto it.

And if you read my post you'll see that the new laptop is only 14 months old (quad core 1tb HDD 8 GB RAM so not too shabby) and the old one is actually just over 5 years old (a bit younger than I initially thought).