Good morning everybody!
I believe that I have found the solution to the problem regarding the PCMCIA card freeze on Compaq evo.
My Story
After a year or so of using dial up connection I decided the time had come to switch to broadband, a switch that many of my friends had made over the previous months.
I thought it best to purchase a router to share the connection between my pc and laptop, so I purchased the Belkin ADSL Router with Built in Modem and a Belkin 54g WLAN card. I was able to install my PCMCIA card with no problems HOWEVER after having to format my laptop the problem started.
Each time that I tried to install my WLAN card it freezed at the copying files part. I thought that the problem may be due to belkin, not the case though as the card worked perfectly on my friend's laptop, I thought "crap i can't even get a refund!!!" I even updated all the windows patches and drives but no success.
I was dumbfounded, at the point of snapping my PCMCIA card, (I'm sure that feeling is mutual amongst you guys).
At 2am Yesterday, I went on another forum where many people were having the same problems, there was a solution apparently. To eradicate this problem you had to boot from the compaq recovery CD's! I thought oh no!!!!! And even then some people were not able to install their wireless card.
2.45am I find the solution
Right I think I've milked it enough, here's what I did and it worked. Go to
http://h18007.www1.hp.com/support/fi...3_5178.html#31
and go to the sub-section titled
Operating System - Enhancements and QFEs
Download all of the available downloads, the first one being ATI U1.....etc
This solved the problem for me, I did not change my bios settings or anything else, I just downloaded and installed all of the available downloads and when I attempted to install my belkin 54g from the installation CD it worked, it did not freeze and it did it NOT hang when booting my laptop again.
NOTE: I had already installed all windows updates before hand, I don't know if this will make a difference or not.
Hope this solves your problem. If it does then please let the word out as I've been on many a forum and so many people have this problem.