On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 4:20 PM, alan pae <alanpae at ilkda.com> wrote: > Sorry if this is a bit naive. > > I'm looking at picking up a Compaq V6000 dual core AMD notebook. > > According to the HCL this computer is supported but it looks like the drivers > for the built-in wifi are 32-bit only. ?The adapter is listed as a Broadcom > device. > > So, can I still boot 64-bit or do I need to modify the boot to run 32-bit? > > Is it easier to just replace the existing adapter with one that has 64-bit > drivers and can anyone recommend another adapter?
Not sure if that model has a mini-PCI NIC Whitelist (only allowing the system to boot with specific pci-id'd NIC's) so you might be stuck with broadcom there, unless you can find an atheros based HP/Compaq mini-pci nic. Zydas (zd1211b) based USB adapters are well supported and pretty ubitiquous. I've picked up several for between $10-20 on ebay or other places. Pretty much anyone who has made a USB wifi nic, used the Zydas (zd1211b is the name of the chipset) hardware. Be careful though. Some vendors actually used different hardware for the same model numbers with extra letters to show versioning. Trendnet did this, so a rev b might be zd1211b based, while rev c might be RTL-8189 based. They get away with this because they always distribute windows drives with the device, so windows users never really know.
