HP Pavilion ze4125 & Orinoco Gold & Windows XP

[Terje Oseberg]

First, I'd like to say that the search feature on these forums appear to be broken. When I search for, "Orinoco Gold Windows XP" with the, "All words" selected, I get all matches for any word. And when try to search for, "orinoco AND gold AND windows AND xp" with, "Boolean" selected, I get the same results.

So, if there is already an answere out there for my question, this is why I was unable to find it.

Anyways, I have a Mac G3 and an HP Pavilion ze4125 running Windows XP and two Orinoco Gold wireless PC-Cards. Both of them work great in the G3.

When I first installed the card in the Pavilion, they worked very bad. I would get timed out connections and dropped telnet sessions in areas of the house where the Mac worked great.

I then had a friend come over with his IBM laptop running Windows 2000. We installed the Orinoco Gold card into his computer and it worked like the Mac. We listened to music over the net and moved around the house and there was no hickups for over an hour.

Then I tried installing my friends wireless card into the HP to see if it had the same problem as the Orinoco Gold. The problems didn't seem as bad, but the performance was not perfect either.

Then, I went to use the Orinoco Gold Card in the Pavilion again, and it didn't work at all.

I have now removed and installed the drivers several times and nothing appears to fix the problem. Other than the Orinoco Wireless card, the Pavilion appears to work great. I have had no other problems.

I have downloaded and installed the latest Orinoco drivers, and I have tried to let Windows XP use the defaults drivers, but am not sure or able to tell if installing the Orinoco Client Software has upgraded something in WinXP such that the old drivers are now gone and cannot be restored without deleting/replacing files by hand.

Is anyone else out there having this problem?

When I had the crappy performance when the Orinoco card was first installed, I emailed Lucent and they said that the cause of the crappy performance could be either and outdated driver, improper setting, or excessive RF interference being transmitted from the laptop.

Is anyone else out there having similar problems? Does anyone else have an Orinoco card and a Pavilion ze4125 running under XP? Can anyone offer any solutions?

Terje

[Roger Faucher]

Hi:

I would try installing the latest BIOS & Notebook Drivers from the following web page and then re-evaluate:

http://h20004.www2.hp.com/sdd4bsd/driverspage_pool.html?pm_series_oid=214341&locale=en_US

Keep us posted!

Roger

[Brian Hackley]

Terje,

I have a ze4125 working with 802.11b Linsys WC11 (a loaner) which works fine at short distances but that is about it. I hope that will be temporary until my Orinoco Gold card arrives. I haven't done much testing to be honest

Have you tried using different channels? I found the one didn't work at all, and another worked much better. Have not had time to test more than two channels. I would GUESS that RF interference / leakage in the 2.4Ghz band could certainly explain the difference between the Mac, IBM, and the ze4125. Note the ze4125 does not offer a "factory" 802.11b mini-PC card, whereas the ze5000 ("KB" or Intel-based CPU) does.

As for the suggestion to update BIOS and XP Drivers: all units shipping from HP are supposed to have those integrated already (my unit did); there is one other driver update for the audio driver that does however need to be loaded.

Hope this helps a little,

-> Brian Hackley

p.s. I'll let you know how the Orinoco behaves once it arrives!

[Terje Oseberg]

Ohh, I forgot to mention, I did successfully downgrade the Orinoco drivers from the version that comes with Service Pack 1 (7.64.1.316) to the latest version at orinocowireless.com (7.42.0.300) by changing the version number in the registry and in C:\windows\inf\oem20.inf to 7.40.0.200

So, now I currently have the latest version of the driver form the orinocowireless.com site and the card still doesn't work.

Terje

[Brian Hackley]

Terje,

Here's an update:
Linksys 802.11b card (Verison 3) on ze4125, I was getting about 25 feet/1 wall and lots of dropouts. Tried channels 7 and 11. Upgraded a couple of days later to WinXP SP1. No problems with the upgrade. But the Linksys was awefully slow still.

A couple of days after that, I removed the Linksys 802.11b card, then uninstalled its drivers, and rebooted.

Installed Orinoco Gold card, using default WinXP settings.
It worked fine with 128bit WEC to Linksys 802.11b BEFW11S4 after setting the BEFW11S4 preamble from Short to the default (long). Using Channel 3. Works fine, goes up and down stairs and outside thru 3-4 walls.

Today, Windows update told me about updated drivers from Lucent 7.64.1.316, so I gave them a try, and they work great. Now the Orinoco client manager also works.

So, I don't know if I have helped or not. I hate to suggest this because its a drastic step, but maybe you ought to think about saving your data files to CD-R(W) and reloading your ze4125??
(I hear you groaning now...).

By the way, a suggestion that you might think about posting further ze4125 issues in the Business Customer Support forums, under "Mobile Products" -> "Notebook PCs - Pavilions" http://forums.itrc.hp.com/cm/CategoryHome/1,,411,00.html

I hope this really does help,

-> Brian Hackley

[George Radojevic]

Terje,

I definitely believe you should try changing the Linksys channel from whatever it is now to something else. I think z's HP laptop is sensitive to the wireless channel currently used. Of course, mine, my wife's, and my mom's laptops all have the same ORiNOCO Gold card that you have, and they work... ;-)

g

[Terje Oseberg]

This thread has been continued in the, "business customer discussion groups > mobile products > notebook PCs - pavilions" forum which can be found here: http://forums.itrc.hp.com/cm/QuestionAnswer/1,,0x93b23a1c04ffd61190050090279cd0f9,00.html

Thanks for your help.

Terje