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I recently bought an SMC 2642W CF 802.11b card for my iPaq h2215. The price is hard to beat; they've been running for less then $40 on compgeeks.com (although they appear to be gone as of today.)

Anyway, SMC doesn't give you any driver other than an old PPC2002 driver. With the SMC driver, the card performs poorly and I couldn't make it work under MS 0.4. So I went searching for other Prism drivers that are compatible with the 2642W.

The good news is, Asus has a really up-to-date PPC2003 driver for their WL-110 CF card that works with the 2642W. You can find the Asus driver at:
http://www.asus.com/support/download/item.aspx?ModelName=WL-110&Type=Latest

(Usual caveats about upgrading PPC2003 drivers apply; I did many, MANY full resets of my 2215 in this testing b/c it seems that drivers don't uninstall very well. When you do get the Asus driver installed, and you insert the card, it will not be recognized. Make sure you enter "prismnds" as the driver name at this point.)

This driver contains much newer firmware (1.8.0 vs. 1.3.6 that came in the card) and tremendously improves the sensitivity of the card. If you've been dissapointed with a 2642W, you really should consider updating the driver. It seemed to me this driver/firmware from Asus doubled the range of this card!

PocketWinc, PocketWarrior and WiFiFoFum all work awesome with the 2642W and the Asus driver. I've been really happy with it.

OK so the bad news. MS 0.4 runs with this card/driver combination but cannot find any APs. If you're associated to an AP when you run it, you will see the AP you're associated to and only that AP... but that's always the case. I've gotten used to PocketWarrior but would really rather use MS.

Oh and I tried the Senao drivers everyone talks about; they won't attach to this card at all. They also won't uninstall cleanly for me, which is a real pain.

For the curious, my h2215 has ROM 1.10.07 (from April '04, IIRC). The SMC card says it's hw rev. 1.0.

Hope this helps. I was really dissapointed with this card when I first installed it. And I'm still dissapointed that MS 0.4 is unhappy, but I think it's usable in the meantime.

PS - The PPC2003 wireless connection manager sucks!!!! I hate this #$%* thing. At least the SMC PPC2002 driver had its own connection manager that was decent. Sigh....

does anybody have the firmware for SMC2642W available? It is no longer on the homepage of SMC nor can I find the ASUS driver.

Thanks

tatnat,
as it says in the original post, the firmware for this card is embedded in the card's driver. It is automatically downloaded to the card when the driver initializes. Hence, there is no "flashing" you can do to this card. By getting the updated driver, you get updated firmware.

Also, the link I gave in my original post still works for me; it takes me directly to the ASUS WL110 driver download page. Does it not work for you?

coredump4,
thanks for your help, I was not aware of the concept to integrate the firmware into the driver....
I have now firmware version 1.7.4.

If anyone needs the senao drivers for the 2642 hit me up on aim g0tr3wt23

I read the directions Coredump4 posted (thanks Coredump4). I downloaded the driver, launched the software, then downloaded the driver to my PDA (Jornada 568 Pocket PC). However, it's still not working.

Sometimes when I plug it in, the green light will come on, but I can't get on the web. Or when I plug it in, it will say something like "don't recognize" and I enter prismnds, it still doesn't work.

Any suggestions, before I throw this da&% thing in the trash? Should I try downloaded some different drivers? Is there some network config that I need to tweak in my pocket pc when I have the card inserted?

Hi dongee,
When you insert the card and it asks you for a driver to use, that should only happen on the very first time you insert the card. If it prompts you for the driver name on subsequent inserts, something's wrong. Actually, it's ironic that you mention this, because my 2642W broke recently, and was behaving much the same way you describe. SMC puts a lifetime warranty on their stuff; see if you can get it replaced under warranty. However when you talk to them, you may want to leave out the fact that you're using another vendor's driver with the SMC card. :-)
One thing I was wondering is, what version of PocketPC does your model of Jornada have? Make sure the driver version is matched with the PPC release.

good luck...

I generally just use my own drivers over at http://prism.tjtech.org. Sorry the site's down, we can never seem to pay the bandwidth costs these days. It will return April 1st if you can wait that long.