Toshiba L300 wireless card replacement issues

Yet another post about the terrible Toshiba L3xx series of laptop - this time regarding the problems I encountered when trying to replace the internal PCI-Express Wireless (WLAN) card and how I overcame them.

This model (well, mine at least) ships by default with a Realtek RTL8187B card. This is an awful card, for many reasons which I will not go in to.

I wanted to upgrade this card to one that supported Wireless N. There were 2 reasons for this:

1. The internal card had receiving issues after a period of time, and;
2. My router supports Wireless N and I wanted to make full use of it.

I purchased a basic card from eBay - it was a generic unbranded card, which appeared to be about £3 cheaper than some of the other "branded" ones. At the end of the day, the reliability of the card is determined by the chipset used, and mine used a RALink chip, so I was content with that.

The problems started occuring however when I tried to replace the card. Firstly, the L300 would not POST with the new card at all. The fan was spinning, all lights were on, but nobody was at home. I realized that I had a very early generation Toshiba which had a BIOS whitelist for the WLAN card, preventing me from using anything other than the original. I got around this by putting the original card back in and updating the BIOS to the latest version - this removed the whitelist (I suppose Toshiba had a change of heart).

Despite this, all was not well. The laptop would now POST and boot in to Windows with my replacement card fitted, but it was simply not detected. Cutting a long story short, the reason is...

The Toshiba L3XX series of laptop does not fully implement the PCI-Express specification.

To be exact, Toshiba had been really tight here and have only actually provided the circuitry to use a PCI-Express card that has USB functionality! 

PCI-Express has 4 pins which can be used to provide a simple USB port. Power, Gnd, TX and RX. The original card provided by Toshiba was simply a USB Wireless Dongle in PCI-Express form factor!

Looking closer at the motherboard you can see that only 6 lines have traces on the PCI-Express connector. I believe that 4 of them are for USB, and the other 2 are used for toggling the wireless on/off using the front chassis switch.

This is appalling. I later purchased a ridiculously cheap, very nasty Wireless N card which only had the USB functionality of it and did not rely on the rest of the PCI-Express specification. This worked first time and after installing the drivers I am now writing this post using Wireless N on my new WLAN card! :)

The moral of the story?
The Toshiba L300 is a "put it together as cheaply as you can" jobbie - in other words, it is a nasty piece of crap which is not even suitable to be part of the budget laptop market.

Galaxy Note ADB drivers without Samsung Kies

Further to my previous post here: http://liamcrayden.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/samsung-galaxy-note-n7000-adb-usb.html

I am most disgusted at having to install Samsung Kies just to have the drivers available for my Samsung Galaxy Note. When connecting my phone to a system without Kies, even if I just want to use it as a mass storage device, I have to repeatedly click through dialog boxes to get rid of drivers that Windows can't find.

CDC Serial
SAMSUNG_Android
ADB etc etc.

Installing Samsung Kies does indeed install these drivers and get rid of those driver installation prompts every time I plug in my phone, but its also over 200MB in size (and thats just the compressed download!) and is full of bloatware which seriously impacts the performance and startup time of my PC.

For those of you in my position, here are the drivers that you need. You can use these without Kies.

FOR ADVANCED USERS (install these through Device Manager manually) 4MB: http://www.crayden-group.co.uk/secure/galaxy_note_drivers.zip
UPDATE 27/06/2014: New link here - http://www.purplerooster.co.uk/galaxy_note_drivers.zip
UPDATE 29/09/2015: New link here - http://www.crayden-group.co.uk/galaxy_note_drivers.zip

 FOR ALL OTHER USERS (includes a simple install wizard) 23MB: http://secure.tinyserve.com/SAMSUNG_USB_Driver_for_Mobile_Phones.exe
UPDATE 27/06/2014: This file is no longer available. Please use the above link instead.

If these have helped you, please comment below or +1 this page so that others can find them too. Also please do not directly link to the above files. Help me spread the word across all your favourite forums and blogs by spreading the link to this blog post please.

Samsung Galaxy Note (N7000) ADB / USB Drivers

I am in the business of software development, and it really annoyed me to discover that in order to use my new Samsung Galaxy note as a development device I had to download a ~200MB file from the Samsung website and install several hundred megabytes of bloatware called 'Samsung Kies'.

All I am interested in is the USB drivers which will allow me to connect to my phone to develop android applications. Some people also need these files if they want to root their device. As Samsung Kies is IMO a piece of junk, I have seperated out the USB driver package and present it here as a single, unmodified, 23MB download for both 32 and 64 bit Windows systems. Note that the package actually includes several drivers for various Samsung phones, hence the (larger than necessary) file size.

Click here for Samsung Galaxy Note N7000 ADB / USB Drivers
UPDATE 27/06/2014: Link is now dead :( See my newer post for an updated link and method here: http://liamcrayden.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/galaxy-note-adb-drivers-without-samsung.html

Please comment or +1 if these drivers were of any help to you. If I get round to it in the near future I will post the Galaxy-only drivers instead which should be approx 300KB instead of 23MB! Enjoy (and dont waste your valuable time and bandwidth downloading the Kies software ever again)