Acer Aspire One p531h replace Mini PCI-E?

Hey guys,

We have bought a couple of these laptops to use for a wireless university project. The Atheros wireless card does not support 802.11a so we also purchased a few Mini PCI-E atheros wireless cards that DO support 802.11a (which we require). We initially thought that we could simply install these new cards in the spare mini pci-e slot in the bottom of the netbook, but when we plugged them in, the card was not detected in bios, windows xp or ubuntu.

Researching this problem brought us to these forums, where reading the posts leads me to believe the spare mini pci-e slot will NOT work unless a hack (taping pin 20???) is done. Is this correct?

As the laptops belong to the university, we are not able to solder or modify the boards physically.

Our question is, for those of you who have taken the Aspire One apart, are we able to also take ours apart and simply replace the factory default wireless card with our new wireless card? Is the card that came with the laptop mini pci-e as well?

Here is a link to the card that we purchased: http://www.wisp.net.au/atheros-wireless ... -p-13.html

Thanks in advance for any help.