MN-720 not recognizing my schools wireless network? 802.11b card does??

I cant get my MN-720 to pick up the signal that my school
is broadcasting. Our entire campus is wireless and my
friends Centrino auctomatically picks up the signal. I
try to manually configure the settings,but to no avail!
all I want to know is how do I disable all the bells and
whistles on the card so that I can pick up the signal my
school broadcasts and login! Its not the schools end
because I was sitting right next to my friends comp and
the schools network automatically says available and then
he gets prompt bye a microsoft user auth box and he
connects! Is there anything that needs to be set or
turned off so that I can see the network too??? It
should all be autoconfigured and all i need to do is
enter my user info.

BTW, the schools network is 802.11b and it doesnt use any
WEP or WPA encryption.

Please help, otherwise Im going to return the card and
forget about "G" all together!