Extending the range of my wireless card
 

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?

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....

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! ;)

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.

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)

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