Wireless LAN Card

I have a wireless card I want to give a friend that was with a used
laptop i bought. All the drivers were installed on my computer so I do
not have the disk. My problem is the card only says it is a 802.11g
Wireless Lan Cardbus Pc card. So is cardbus the maker or some other
company.
Thanks
Adam

metalgod wrote:
> I have a wireless card I want to give a friend that was with a used
> laptop i bought. All the drivers were installed on my computer so I do
> not have the disk. My problem is the card only says it is a 802.11g
> Wireless Lan Cardbus Pc card. So is cardbus the maker or some other
> company.
> Thanks
> Adam
>

You'll have to look elsewhere for the company name. Cardbus
is the form factor of the device.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardbus

Perhaps if you get a copy of Everest, go to "Devices"
and "PCI Devices", it may be identified there. Or
Sisoftware Sandra Lite may identify the thing, on one
of the hardware PCI bus entries.

http://www.majorgeeks.com/download.php?det=4181 (Everest)

For example, my sound card has a Device_ID of 13F6-0111.
The first number is the Vendor (chip-maker) and the second
number is the Device of that vendor. The third hexidecimal
number is the Subsystem ID (1681-A650 in my case), and it
potentially identifies the company making the card the chip is sitting on.
(Note that Everest swapped the 1681 and A650 numbers, so
where they appear in other places, the order of the two
hex numbers can be reversed. See below for an example.)

You can get a list of all the PCI devices here.

http://pciids.sourceforge.net/

This will give a text file with all of them, suitable for
storing on your disk for later.

http://pciids.sourceforge.net/pci.ids

The section for my sound card is here, I searched for 13f6, to
find who made the main chip on the card:

13f6 C-Media Electronics Inc
0011 CMI8738
0100 CM8338A
13f6 ffff CMI8338/C3DX PCI Audio Device
0101 CM8338B
13f6 0101 CMI8338-031 PCI Audio Device
0111 CM8738
1019 0970 P6STP-FL motherboard
1043 8035 CUSI-FX motherboard
1043 8077 CMI8738 6-channel audio controller
1043 80e2 CMI8738 6ch-MX
13f6 0111 CMI8738/C3DX PCI Audio Device
1681 a000 Gamesurround MUSE XL

The 13f6-0111 is a CM8738 chip, and there are six Subsystem IDs listed.
The Gamesurround MUSE is a Hercules card, but they didn't identify
it as such. Obviously, there are way more Subsystem IDs than that
(the CM8738 has been around for years), so this file is far from
complete. But if a device is not identified, it gives another
opportunity to try to figure out who made it and what driver
might work.

Sometimes, Googling with the Device and Vendor numbers, can also
uncover info. So those numbers are handy for searching as well.

Now, I have a ZIP file with my sound card's driver package in
it. The file will have one or more ".ini" files. For an installer
to work, an entry in the ".ini" has to match the above hex
numbers for the card. This is one line from the ".ini" from
my driver package. 13F6 is CMedia. 0111 is the CM8738 chip.
1681 is the company that made the sound card. A650 is the
number that identifies the particular instance of card from
that sound card making company. ".ini" files are not required
to be honest - some companies would have put "Hercules MUSE"
where the WDM_CMPCI7 text is located. So a good .ini can
identify a card, while a bad .ini hides the identity of
the company making the card.

PCI\VEN_13F6&DEV_0111&SUBSYS_A6501681 = WDM_CMPCI7

Paul

"metalgod" <no@spam.invalid> wrote in message
news:1350oop338k8e31@news.supernews.com...
>I have a wireless card I want to give a friend that was with a used
> laptop i bought. All the drivers were installed on my computer so I do
> not have the disk. My problem is the card only says it is a 802.11g
> Wireless Lan Cardbus Pc card. So is cardbus the maker or some other
> company.

First thing to try is simply install it and see if Windows XP recognises the
device - it might have generic drivers that are suitable.

Do you still have the drivers on your PC? If so, insert the card into your
machine where the drivers are installed. Once it is recognised and
activated, then go to the control panel and look at your network adapters
list to find out the manufacturer and model of the card.