Extending the range of my wireless card

[Tester123]

I travel a lot, and most of the time i find myself just out of range w/ my factory integrated wireless on my HP ze4500 Celeron Laptop, any suggestions? USB antenna?

[steveincolumbus]

Without opening up the laptop and doing modifications to it there is no way othere than to add a new wireless card, such as the Lucent/Orinoco card with an extrnal jack to connect an ant. to....

[Fearless_Hyena]

There's not much you can do. However, if you get a weak signal, you'll find that positioning the laptop and rotating it within the room can sometimes make the most of a crappy signal. If you have anything to monitor the signal strength or SNR you'll find it helpful (netstumbler works, and there are many others).

If you want to consider adding a card, I'm a big fan of the SMC 2532W-B high power 802.11b card. It's about $55. Great sensitivity and you can add an external antenna too. If you're doing business travel just expense it!

[mcovey]

Try the cantenna.
http://www.cantenna.com/

Some ornicoro cards have a little hole where you can put in an antenna wire to drape out the window.

There are more expensive cantenna like devices that you actually point like a radar gun in the direction of the signal.

[blindawg]

you can opt for a PCMCIA wireless card with an antenna and jsut disable the internal one.. Cisco makes a damn nice card, the antenna even unscrews so you can connect and external antenna for a bit better range (or war driving)

[Slavakion]

You could try this, build yourself a parabolic antenna for ~10 cents.