This page lists the PCI IDs of devices known to appear on IBM's whitelist of Mini PCI wireless cards. If a card does not appear on the whitelist, the Thinkpad will refuse to boot. IBM do not clearly advertise this "feature"; nor do IBM provide you with any information about which third party cards will work anyway. You can find more discussion of the issue here.
Some of this information has been verified, but much has
not. Please do not use it to make purchasing decisions. I make
no guarantee that cards listed as working will actually do
so. IBM will sell you a card that is guaranteed to work.
Warning
A green background indicates that the part has been confirmed to work or fail by a user inserting the card into the machine. A yellow background indicates that the information provided is a guess based on searching the BIOS and other information. A red background indicates that no information is currently available. Names were obtained from marketing material and Google
| Part | T30 | T40 | X40 |
| Atheros 802.11a/b | No | Yes | No |
| Atheros 802.11a/b/g | No | Unknown | Yes |
| IBM 11/a/b/g Wireless Lan Mini PCI adapter | No | Unknown | Yes |
| Intel 2100B | No | Yes | Yes |
| Intel 2200BG | No | No | Yes |
| Lucent Orinoco | Yes | Unknown | Yes |
| Cisco Aironet | Yes | Yes | No |
| IBM High Rate Wireless | Yes | Unknown | No |
Where subsystem IDs are not listed, they may not be important. On the other hand, they may be. I honestly don't know. If you've used one of the cards with no subsystem listed in a modern Thinkpad, please let me know. Alternatively, if you've successfully used one of the cards listed with a different subsystem id, please let me know as well.
As before, information here is believed to be correct but has in most cases not been tested. Please don't use it to make purchasing decisions. IBM will sell you a card that's guaranteed to work, even if it does cost you 3 times as much as a generic one.