What 802.11N internal card will work with a Compaq CQ60-212US?

I am hoping to upgrade the above notebook to 802.11N but I am having trouble finding information on what internal cards will work for it. It is an AMD Athlon X2 sytem wiyh an Nvidia nforce chipset running Windows Vista Home Premium 64bit. The card it uses currently ( an 802.11B/G) is an Atheros 5007 based card (part #459339-003). HP/Compaq does make a Atheros 5009 based 802.11N card (part# 482260-001) but it is in short supply and those place that do have it are prices as well as no way to verify it would work with this model as HP customer care would not give a part number via e-mail and directed me to their 800 number to place an order ($$$$). I also have heard some issues with the 5009 based cards . I have been looking at an Intel 4965AGN and a Broadcom BCM94322MC but no way to verify it would work with my computer. One seller on E-bal says the Intel unit will not work with HP/Compaq computers but in google searches I have found some HP use this Intel card/chipset in their WLAN card so I was hoping that someone familiar in this area could give me some help.Thanks.

 

I believe HP has a whitelist of cards allowed in their notebooks.

 

Yeah - I am now hearing about this "whitelist" in the BIOS that prevents the use of unapproved cards but what irks me is that some cards that people are having problems using HP branded cards like the Broadcom in newer models and of course HP will not give out what cards will work so it can make money hand over fist. The card they have available through their shopping number ( and is out of stock) they want $200 for and that is half of what I paid for the whole computer. I wonder if the "whitelist" block would be avoided if I loaded up Linux- one thing for sure never again will I even look at an HP/Compaq or IBM laptop again. I am used to building my own computers and using what parts I wanted and this limitation of hardware reminds me of the protectionism of the old days in the Apple/Mac arena- even they learned and now more flexible with expansion card choice.

 

Long post warning -sorry about the long post but I wanted to give full details of how I got this upgrade working



Well after being told the only option for getting "N" speed I really had was a USB ( yuck - didn't like the idea of a dongle sticking out the side of my laptop and it has no expansion card slots on the side like some do )solution on a number of forums I dug a little deeper across the net and stumbled on a internal a used NIC card on E-Bay -HP Part# 482260-001 (it's an Atheros 5009 based card) for $24 with free shipping so I figured I would give it a shot. Well it came in the mail and I promptly pulled out the old one -plugged the new card it and the computer booted (yay - good sign -it got past the white list block).Now the first problem - the WLAN light/button stayed amber meaning the WLAN was not active. I checked the Device Manager and it showed an unknown network device with an exclamation point. I went digging for an updated driver and on a hunch I checked the HP site under my computer and saw an updated drive for my original board so I tried it. Much to my surprise when I started to install the driver it also had support for the 5009/802.11N version even though it is not a standard item on my model. After installing finished Device Manager showed a proper instalation of an Atheros 5009 802.11/a/g/n WiFi Adapter so I hit the button and it went active (blue). However it still not detect my network but I recalled reading posts in the past about some Windows update causing a problem like this so I tried doing a system restore to remove the updates but it failed.I looked at the program uninstall option and would have to uninstall 56 updates individually so I decided to do a re-install of Vista. Anyone that has an HP/Compaq knows how unreliable the system restore is so after my attempt failed to do so ( either from the recovery disks or the recovery partition) early after I purchased my system a friend gave me a copy ( he has a small custom computer business- he said this is fully legal since I have a legal license (key) that is part of what purchased - HP tried to charge me for a disk set). I did the upgrade option of the install which left my programs intact and just put Windows in freshly. After the installation I reinstalled the updated driver - rebooted and was able to connect to my network but at only 54Mbps (sigh). In my travels I read that there was some talk about problems with WEP and the N draft spec in some situations so I shut down all security on my network (not a good idea usually so only for testing) and the connection speed jumped to 300Mbps but when I tried enabling security features in dropped then I saw the following in the side (help) window:





To reach maximum wireless performance, the client like WN511B must connect to this router using WPA2(with AES) . For clients connecting in WPA-PSK( with TKIP), the maximum wireless speed will be at 802.11g.





Sure enough when I set the Router ( a Netgear WNR3500)and the 5009 NIC to this security level I got a secure connection at 300Mbps ( which is interesting as the highest speeds reported on some forums with this card was 270Mbps -perhaps the udated driver?). Again - sorry for the long winded post but I wanted to give full details