I've successfully flashed my Lucent WaveLan Orinoco Silver to a Gold.
When I first tried, alchemy read the PDA okay, but it gave an error when I tried to write to the card (using the "modified drivers for Windows XP found
here). I found
this page and obvserved the following:
Original, 14 channels PDA for users with corrupted PDA (this PDA could be flashed with Alchemy):
ORiNOCO PDA.
I downloaded the above PDA and flashed it. Dunno why, but that worked. I then applied the latest 8.72 Lucent Firmware. My card connects to my 128bit WEP access points and detects all 14 channels, still using the modified drivers I noted above.
These modified drivers don't support WPA. Thusly, I've updated to Agere's "sr02-2.3" drivers.
My card still connects to all my access points (including my 128bit WEP access point), however, the Windows XP "View Wireless Networks" utility shows all available access points with
0/5 bars, yet it's detecting more AP's than before and most of the AP's are excellent signals! Once connected to an AP, the connection status shows the correct 4/5 or 5/5 bar signal. Netstumbler shows correct SNR figures when using the Orinoco as the selected device, but it reports much lower SNR's when I choose NDIS 5.
Question: How can I make WinXP's "View Wireless Networks" utility display the correct signal bars with the latest drivers, instead of empty signal bars? Other than that, these drivers work great. For now, I'm going to ignore the bug since the card functions properly.