# A word of caution about laptop wireless cards



## big_girl (Mar 26, 2012)

Hi everyone,

Sorry if this is a bit random, but I just wanted to share my experience with my slightly older Lenovo g530 notebook.. This comes with the nefarious Broadcom bcm43xx wireless card (I forget exactly but I think I have the bcm4312); in case you haven't had the misfortune of encountering one, they are generally useless to anyone with a POSIX operating system.. In my mind, Broadcom and Silicon Image are two names to avoid if you care about your network & your data. 

Anyway, laptop wireless cards these days are connected via mini PCIe to the motherboard, and you can browse from a wide selection of [generally inexpensive] aftermarket wireless PCIe cards and swap them out to really improve compatibility and performance. Since it wasn't otherwise being used much, I simply wanted pfSense on this machine, so I bought a nice Intel wireless card that was well-supported by FreeBSD, popped my case panel open and swapped out the card. 

The big grin on my face was wiped right off when I powered the machine back up, and the BIOS informed me that the Lenovo nanny didn't approve of my card and wouldn't boot the machine. There are two solutions, neither of which is worth my time - hack the card and change its ID or hack the BIOS --- the better solution would not to purchase Lenovo/IBM notebooks in the future. (Of course I didn't know about this when I bought the thing). 


A good day to you!
-bg


----------



## wblock@ (Mar 27, 2012)

HP does that also.


----------



## Beeblebrox (Mar 27, 2012)

Maybe you'll have some luck with coreboot, which is an open-source BIOS.


----------

