Fitting Broadcom WLAN card into Toshiba laptop

I post this here as a future point of reference to anyone installing a Broadcom 802.11g WLAN PCI network card in a Toshiba laptop that formerly had an Askey or Agere card fitted - both of which are now unavailable. Just plugging it in and loading the driver doesn't work. All you'll get is a 'No wireless networks detected'. That's because Toshiba configure the connector differently to other manufacturers.

The fix sounds strange but it works perfectly.

You need to cover contacts 11 and 13 on the card. All the contacts on the back of the card are numbered evenly, and on the front of the card, all contacts are odd numbers. You could cover contacts 11 & 13 with electrical tape, but it tends to slide off on insertion. I chose to simply cover them with a small strip of paper fixed with superglue which, if ever necessary, can be removed using a solvent. A more permanent solution would be to scrape the copper away very carefully.

To identify the correct contacts, holding the card with the connector strip at the bottom, you count left to right starting with 1, 3, 5, etc. Contacts 11 and 13 are right next to each other. See  image below for more detail.