Quote Originally Posted by Sabrewings View Post
That wouldn't be very efficient, in my mind. He probably soldered the contacts for the antenna to the same contacts for the internal antenna.
I'm going to guess that you don't know me very well. I'm hardly a novice here...

I disconnected the secondary antenna lead from the mini-pci card and taped it to the side. I then used another antenna connector from another dead laptop to bring the signal out to the external connector, to which I screw on the external antenna. The original aux antenna and wiring is all intact and un-modified. The only alteration to the chassis was to drill the 1/4" hole in the secondary fan grill (which isn't there anyway, and leaves a lot of room to install a fitting). I have a half-dozen spare 5100 series chassis here, anyway.

Not that destroying this laptop would be a huge loss, but I have spent a LOT of time making this one out of a lot of other dead ones. Currently, it's a 3.06GHz /HT/1MB/533FSB, upgraded cooling, 2GB PC2700, 7200rpm 80GB, Nvidia 5200XT w/128 RAM. I fix computers on the side, and I have a LOT of spare parts lying around from dead laptops.