Add Wireless to Your Old Laptop

Almost all new laptops already come complete with a wireless transmitter and receiver built into the motherboard, or installed in a special port in the casing. But if you an old laptop and you wish to add a wireless to it, what do you have to do? Read the following article to find the answer.
If you wish to add wireless to an old laptop, you can quickly and easily upgrade without having to splash out on a brand new machine.
1. Step 1
Check your laptop manual or visit a computer store or web site to find out if your laptop has a compartment for a wireless card. The good news is that this compartment offers you a really easy solution to installing wireless. However, the bad news is that the wireless card is nearly always a ‘proprietary part’ which means that you will have to buy the card from the same company who manufactured your laptop, and pay whatever price they charge for the card. Some manufacturers discourage people installing these cards themselves, and so you may have to end up paying for an engineer to install the card for you.
2. Step 2
Another way to add wireless to an old laptop is by purchasing a plug and play wireless transceiver PC Card. The main problem with this is that your laptop may only have one or two PC Card slots, so obviously you would be limited to how many other cards you could have installed. To overcome this, some companies combine a wireless transceiver with a network interface card (NIC) which gives your laptop access to connect to either a wireless network or a wired Ethernet in one unit. Something else to bear in mind is that the card will probably have a small antenna that protrudes from the side of your laptop. It's a good idea to remove the card before you put your laptop away after each use to ensure that the antenna does not get damaged during transit or storage.
3. Step 3
A second plug and play solution is to use a USB wireless adapter, which simply plugs into one of the spare USB ports on your laptop. As with PC Cards, they are available from a wide variety of computer and IT stores, which helps to keep competition healthy, and prices relatively low. A USB wireless adapter will also stick out from the side of the computer as well, but is a much more robust solution. Unlike the PC Card antenna, the USB unit will be able to stand the majority of knocks it receives, however it is still advisable that you get into the habit of removing the unit when shutting down your computer after each use.
Conclusion
As you can see it is incredibly easy to turn your old laptop into a wireless laptop. It is also a much cheaper option when compared to the cost of buying a brand new laptop. By adding wireless to an old laptop, not only are you saving yourself money, but you are saving yourself the time of having to back up and transfer all your files and programs to a new machine. Also, those tips are very easy and will allow you work on you old laptop and surfing internet quickly and do a lot of things as if it’s a new laptop.