Lenovo X201 wireless card suffers BIOS lock

I am having some trouble with my Wireless card on my laptop. I am using the Lenovo thinkpad X201 which is having inbuilt Lenovo Wireless card. I think that it is Realtek 8172/8192SE card. Now I want to change this card because it is lacking performance. But I don’t whether it matches to my laptop or not. I heard some conflicting reports from other users who tried to change their wireless card. They say that there is BIOS locked. It didn’t take other party or third party peripherals to it. It only takes the card that had been supplier by the Lenovo. I am confused now. I don’t know are they saying truth or not. Any manner I need a correct answer as soon as possible. Thanks for any replies.

I think that there is a BIOS white list in Lenovo X201. For that it is not allowing you to use other wireless card unless it is from Lenovo and designated for thinkpads. If you cannot able to use other third party cards you can go for Intel models. You can use Intel 6200, Intel 6300, Intel 100 etc.. As far as I know I Intel supports all platforms of computer. You can view the X201 compatible hardware or accessories guide in the official website of Lenovo. If you are using Windows OS then why do you need to change this card? You can obtain windows compatible drivers very easily to improve the performance.

If your BIOS is locking the Wireless card then do not update the BIOS version. As my knowledge the Lenovo recently updated the BIOS lock and I think it is still not enabled on older version of BIOS. If the usage of internal Wireless card is not possible the use external wifi device which enables you to connect via USB. The external wifi cards are something like pen drive which can be easy to carry along with you and it won’t cost you more.

For what purpose you want to use wireless card? Is it for LAN connection or internet connection or connecting to other devices? As far as I know there is no BIOS lock in Linux version models. It is not my opinion, I just saw it in viewers pole. There are several other models which have the BIOS lock, like HP and Compaq have 100% and Acer has only 50%.

If the BIOS is has white list of compatible accessories then you cannot use other retailer or manufacturer internal devices. The only way is to overriding the Bios white list if possible. You will need to find out how to crack this list. I read somewhere about the utility or a tool for flipping a bit in the CMOS. I don’t have much information or link about this right now. But if you are able to find out this utility or some similar utility you can somehow override the BIOS.

You may know that all the Wireless cards are physically identical, they only differ by their firmware IDs. I think that the Lenovo wish to incriminate a massive rack up on generic cards. To get rid of this you need to play with CMOS settings. Some version or models of motherboards contain a Clear CMOS or Clear Password jumper sited close to the CMOS RAM chip. When you change jumper position and boot the system. Now you can erase the CMOS data or password. Next Re-set the jumper back to original point and boot into the CMOS Setup to acquire necessary changes.