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...
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.
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.
