Updating Laptop for Wireless Connection

[Mrs T]

I have an old laptop which has wireless capability but is not compatible with my BT Home Hub, ie it needs WPA not WEP.   My question is, if I buy a USB wireless adaptor, will it override the integral wireless card(?) or will the integral card need to be disabled?  If the latter, how is this done?

The laptop has XP and the advice on the Wireless Connection wizard is to download Service Pack 2 which should alleviate the problem but, apart from the fact that I would have the hassle of setting up a dial up connection in order to download this, I seem to remember that when I downloaded it before, the laptop crashed and it took me ages to restore it to its previous state.   I subsequently replaced it with my current laptop.

I would be grateful for some help from those who understand these things 

[JohnMcL7]

In short yes, if you buy a USB network adapter it will simply show as an additional network adapter in your network connections.  For simplicity you can disable your onboard one but it's easy to do as you can do it in Windows by opening network connections in the control panel and then right clicking the non-working wireless connection and choose disable.  That way it won't show as up as an available network card.  Any idea what the network card is?

What service pack do you have at the moment?  It sounds like you're on service pack 1 which if you're online with is not a good idea, even this wireless issue aside there's a lot of security updates which protect your computer so I'd always advise you have the latest patches and services packs (service pack 3 is the last one for Windows).  There's a couple of ways you can get it, either you can connect your laptop to the Homehub with a network cable if your laptop has a network port (looks like a modem port but a bit bigger) or you can download service pack 3 as a single executable on another machine and transfer it via a usb stick.

John

[Mrs T]

Thanks, John.  I have PM'd you.

Pat