It's the old vendor lock-in trick. I'm more experienced with Dells, and as far as I can tell, there is no such restriction on Dell laptops. The only problem I have seen is on the Latitude C600 (aka Inspiron 4000) which was Dell's first mini-pci model, they don't include the antenna wires, you get them with the card if you order it from Dell. The C610/4100 included the wires, so you can put whatever card you want in there.
Also, worth noting is most desktop based wireless cards are actually a mini-pci card mounted in a slot with a shield over it. When Dell's site was lacking on variety, I suggested to people on the forum to go and buy a linksys card and disassemble it to remove the mini-pci card. Many did and it worked fine. One caveat is when they solder the antenna wires rather than use the plugs. Since desktop pcs only use one antenna, you'll have only one jack to plug into on the card if the other was soldered. If there is a way to alter the antenna diversity settings on such a card, I'd only enable the side that is actually plugged in. _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
