Useful advice for older Toshiba laptop users

I recently did a complete reinstall of XP on an old Toshiba Satellite laptop. The actual model was a P10-804, but that's not too important. All drivers were downloaded from the Toshiba site and all worked fine except the wireless card would not connect to a WPA protected signal. The original Toshiba driver was written before WPA was implemented so the only choice was WEP, which wasn't acceptable.

A search indicated that there was a driver available from a company called Agere a few years ago, but they've since been taken over by LSI and there is no trace of anything Agere on their site! After 4 days of dead links and discontinued websites, I eventually tracked it down. It was on a forum on a thread that was closed 3 years ago, but thankfully it worked. Downloaded it, updated the driver and the first time I tried to connect, I entered the WPA code and it connected immediately.

This same driver works for any laptop fitted with a wireless card designated as MPC13A-20/R and includes Toshiba, Gateway, Sony and others. The Toshiba part number is PA317U-1MPC, which is shown on base.

The driver can be downloaded from here

http://www.fileden.com/files/2009/12/25/2702341/windows_drivers_sr02-2.3.zip

I should add that these drivers will only allow connection via WPA. They will not increase connection speed from 11Mbps to 54Mbps. To do that, the card needs to be replaced with a later model, like a PA3299U-1MPC.

Once downloaded, unzip to a suitable location. There is no installer, so you need to go to Device Manager, right click the card entry and select Update Driver then navigate to the files you downloaded.