Upgrade HP laptop to unsupported WiFi card

I’ve got a HP dv2500 I bought in late 2007, as standard practice I’m constantly updating hardware to see how long I can stretch its useful life…  A while ago on Newegg I found a Wireless N card for just under $30: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833106061 (discontinued) – try http://amzn.to/1RQummf, perfect right?  This card is also a mini-PCIe card, so I ended up getting a metal adapter off ebay.

At round 1 of installation I discovered the “104 unsupported wireless network device detected”.  Long story short, OEM manufacturers certify a small number of wireless cards for your machine – and they ship the BIOS with a specific whitelist.  Apparently its due to some kind of FCC rule/regulation about radiation, or power or wireless signals.  So I put everything on the shelf for almost a year.

Today I decided to have another round.  There are plenty of posts about editing the BIOS to add your card, remove the whitelist etc…  What i discovered today is there is a store of updated BIOSes for many computers with the whitelist already removed for you.  Here are the steps I took to get this working:

1. Buy better wifi card
   • Intel Network 6235AN.HMWWB Centrino WiFi Card Advanced-N 6235 Dual Band Bluetooth Retail
   • Intel 4965AGN Next-Gen Wireless-N PCIe Mini Card Network Adapter – Mini PCI Express – 300Mbps
2. Get and adapter if you need it, some take the whole card, some are a metal piece that just extends it.  I used:Half to Full Height Mini PCI Express(PCI-E) Card Bracket Adapter
3. Get your latest BIOS download – look at the ROM version number (usually the name of the download).  Mine was “sp41959”, so I googled for “sp41959 bios whitelist”
   • Hopefully you’ll find a result somewhere, there’s a large list here as well: http://www.bios-mods.com/forum/Forum-Wifi-WWAN-Whitelist-Removal
   • If not, the community looks responsive, so someone might do it for you, or try editing the BIOS you just downloaded.
4. Run the BIOS upgrade.
5. Install the card
6. At this point the card wasn’t being recognized, so I downloaded the latest Intel PROSet Wireless drivers, or use their automatic device detection tool: http://www.intel.com/p/en_US/support/detect/wireless-display
7. Everything started working as normal, except much faster!  This computer is a dual-boot with Ubuntu 10 as well, I didn’t have to do anything additional to get the new card working on my Ubuntu partition after getting it running in Windows 7.
8. Speed!