As a follow up to my previous whine-fest and rant about my WiFi woes, I thought I would document what I’ve done in the meantime to solve most of the problems. This will clear the air for a relatively glowing review of the Zaurus Personal Mobile Tool both with the updated Sharp ROM as I am currently exporing with it, and then <a href=”http://www.openzaurus.org/oz_website/content/news”Open Zaurus when I get the guts to take the plunge with that.
Okay, so I was having problems with the D-Link DCF 660W compact flash slot wireless card I had been trying to use with the Zaurus. It had worked just fine at first with an ad-hoc wireless solution I was trying, but then decided to stop working. I had been changing things around, updated my dsl router to include wireless, etc, that I was unsure where the breakdown was occuring.
In parallel with this I had also been trying to install a wireless PCMCIA card on an older Compaq laptop that I was able to rescue from the corporate dumpster a few years ago. I had horrendous luck with both a D-Link (DWL-650) card and a Belkin (FD something) card. Turns out I had picked what I have come to realize were the two worst possible cards to start out with, but I suppose I did learn quite a bit during my driver installation trials with those cards, but I would not wish that particular brand of fun on anyone. I actually tried to do my research after I wantonly picked up the D-Link card, but was still burned by a chipset switch with the Belkin. All I can say is that you will much better off if you are not restricted to the 16-bit offerings and have a laptop that can support 32-bit CardBus and DO NOT ASSUME ANYTHING. Don’t buy one of these if you plan to throw it on the shelf for a couple of weeks. Be ready to return things and don’t waste a lot of time if things don’t work right away.
Of course, I had the benefit of everything I learned during the bad times, but once I had a supported card, it was amazingly painless to get wireless working under linux. The PCMCIA card I ended up with was from Netgear (the MA401) and of course from the store I should have gone to right at first. Live and learn, I guess, but read more horror stories like this one before you begin.
The piece of good news is that after sending my Zaurus unit back to Sharp and receiving it back with more scratches than repairs and no change to the failure of the D-Link cf card, I gave D-Link tech support a try. It had been longer than 30 days, so I could no longer return it to Tiger Direct, plus they require you to go through the manufacturer for an RMA#, regardless.
I want to actually commend D-Link in this regard. I first called them in the middle of the night. The guy tried to help me, but he was clueless: Zaurus-what? What operating system is that? Hehe. Well, at least he got a ticket opened for me before he tried to escalate me to upper-eschelon support where I ended up in phone llimbo. I did not call back right away, because I assumed I would be in for a repetitive nightmare of useless troubleshooting on an item I was sure was defective.
To confirm this in the meantime, I borrowed an HP Ipaq from a coworker. Of course, this has builit-in WiFi, but that was OK, since I wanted to see if I got the same before upon insertion of the CF Card, ie the link light did not stay lit as the card was recognized. And lo and behold, I did get the same behavior!
Armed with this, I called D-Link back and was able to browbeat a low-level tech into understanding that this was not a software issue. That is could not be and that he needed to get me an RMA number right away. He “consulted with his manager” and converted my case to a return for replacement. Yay.
D-Link has a fairly nice setup where you can return an item to them while they are shipping the replacement to you. This is at no cost to the consumer, unless they want the replacement back faster than a week, which I did. I spent a few bucks, got the replacement back before the weekend and magically it works and wonders of wireless are mine.
Lessons learned (with wireless tech specifically and for the whole troubleshooting process, of which I am always trying to hone my skills, in general)? One: research, research and more research, with the least amount of assumptions possible. And two: replace components first, (especially when on a timeline for refunds/returns) and then turn to the main unit itself.
That done, I can now talk about the good stuff (in a later entry) that the Zaurus can bring while comparing it to both my previous PDA (a Handspring Visor Prism) and to a full-sized laptop. And then later moving to Open Zaurus which does seem to maintain the PDA aspect of the Tool, but seems to leave even room for expansion and delight.
