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TiBook Wi-Fi Range Hack: New Card
eggboard writes "Apple likes the profit margins on its internal AirPort card (still $100 three years after introduction), but the Faraday cage that is the Titanium PowerBook keeps the AirPort card and the TiBook's internal antenna from achieving the same range as the plastic-cased white dual-USB iBooks. Wired News reports today on Cliff Skolnick et al's hack, which is simply to use a 200 mW PC Card coupled with OS X-compatible drivers. The cost winds up less than an AirPort Card, and you can get a model with an external antenna jack, too."
Buying a WiFi card and installing drivers is a hack? mmmmmk.
Time for some tasty Shiner Bock!
Goodness knows that Macs command a premium on their hardware, but that's because all their official Apple Hardware has been thoroughly tested and debugged against the various OSii. King Jobs rules a stern and strict kingdom, but at least you get stability.
In contrast, if you start sticking commodity PC hardware in their with poorly tested drivers, yeah, you may save a few bucks, but you lose a lot of stability, your TiBook may no longer be capable of multiday uptimes.
Here's a little experiment, go to any Mac forum and read up on hardware/software bugs, you'll find that 70% of them have been due to poorly designed third party software. Jobs may be greedy, but he also wants you have to the best, most reliable software out there.
I just installed a new video card in my machine. Can I get that written up as a hack on Slashdot? Or does it only count if I use a Mac?
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
In a new hack, area man Bob Tinklepee discovers that his iMac's power cord is "completely interchangable" with the one his PC, thus saving him the $1400 expense of replacing his iMac with a new one when the cord became frayed.
Members of online community slashdot were quick to praise the hack, but their fun was soon over when Apple filed a lawsuit against Bob for violating the DMCA.
Tough nuts, Bob!
Search the forums on Ars and you will see that a large problem with the TiBooks is that the antenna inside often shifts during transport. There is a simple fix where you find the antenna and simply push it back into the proper place and the range suddenly increases to almost iBook like quality.
p c&s=50009562&f=8300945231&m=3480972435
Wait even better, here is the thread:
http://arstechnica.infopop.net/OpenTopic/page?a=t
--- I do not moderate.
I've been using my old Lucent 802.11b PC-card in my old TiBook for some time because the internal card has such poor range.
The driver up on source forge works fine.
Fine, but how is this news?
If the new card is pumping out 200 milliwatts of radio signal as opposed to the usual 30- to 100-milliwatt range of most 802.11b cards, what is the hit on battery life?
I was a Mac user for many years..
[insert pic of attractive woman]
..but the terrible range of the TiBook 802.11b they had was just too much.
I bought a Windows XP based laptop and now my range is all I've ever dreamed of, I'm not locked into one company's hardware and my breath is minty fresh.
- Val
Trolling is a art,
...this story is an utter insult.
Why don't you write up something interesting (and useful to me), like how to get Wi-Fi running on my Newton.
A friend of mine found this fix on the macnet2.com message boards. I have tried it on 5 TiBooks so far and it works great. The fix involves popping out our battery and squeezing the side of the case where the serial number label is. I don't understand why it works because the antenna cable runs in the ofther direction. But it does work. I have about 4x the WiFi reception/transmission range since I fixed my TiBook.
See this is the problem with Mac fanboys is they take PR as fact. Steve Jobs doesn't care about software reliability, he cares about make profits. I'm not trying to put him down, because making profits is exactly what he should be doing. Mac's could use "commodity hardware" stably, but that would cannibalize their own hardware business. Why spend money supporting drivers from other hardware companies? So instead they give preference to their own hardware, which they should because Apple is a hardware company. Its not about stability, its about profits, which is not bad thing, but I'm sick of Apple fanboys thinking that their is some mission behind the company besides profits.
Why is it that almost every other day Wired has an article about Mac-users doing something wacky. I thought maybe it was because alot of Mac users out there were doing really interesting things like the guy who totes all the old Macs around to raves and sets up old school game LANs. But now I wonder... does Wired report every time a Mac user picks his nose? Some of their past stories were a little questionable, but this one is downright stupid. And I love the title "Mac Toters Push Wireless Bounds", wow, look at me, according to Wired I must be pushing the boundaries of my coffee, I'm ADDING SUGAR.
I love my Mac, and I enjoy reading about other Mac users and their quirks, but come on Wired, keep a sense of reality here. Wired is about CULTURE, not technology. The past articles were always about the personalities using Macs to do unique things, but this one reads like a survey review of WiFi cards out of MacAddict.
May you be touched by His Noodly Appendage. RAmen.
I'm the network admin for a school, and Apple tech support REFUSES to talk to you if you've got anything "non-stock" in the machine! What kind of crap is that? I installed a RAID 1 card in my boss's machine, (since he's already had one hard drive failure) and 6 months later his mainboard goes bad....apple wouldn't talk to me until I removed the RAID card and put back the factory hard drive.
Needless to say, that didn't fix the mainboard problem. Then to add insult to injury, Apple wouldn't send me a replacement board (like Dell and Gateway do). I had to take the thing to a local service shop! Apple services it's machines like they are microwaves, or VCRs.....ARRRGH!
Can you imagine Dell or Gateway refusing to troubleshoot problems with you because you've installed a new internal peripheral (i.e network adapter, video card, sound card...etc)?
No wonder corporate america stays away from these things....the support is awful.
-ted
Apple needs to be compatible with other wireless networks where PCs can connect. They can't simply have their own proprietary wireless standard just because it's faster. Apple isn't Microsoft: they can't pull the same kind of crap that MS does with their own proprietary standards.
Wireless gigabit doesn't exist. There is, however, 802.11a and 802.11g that offer more bandwidth. Unforunately, the market hasn't decided which of these two incompatible standards to settle on. 802.11g is slower, but backwards compatible with 802.11b. My bet is that Apple will eventually go with that one. But the market penetration of non-802.11b wireless is currently insignificant.Extreme price? The Airport card is $99 which is about $40-$50 cheaper than 3rd party 802.11b cards.
You really have no idea what you're talking about.
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
I like *not* having an external antenna on my TiPB. My laptop constantly goes in and out of my school bag. I prefer not having to pay extra attention to a little peice of plastic sticking out in these and other such situations.
Besides, there are ways to improve the range of the built-in card (I get great range). This discussion thread gives some interesting info.
Boom Shanka
Newton wavelan/wi-fi drivers
Huh? Can anyone explain this? Seems flat out wrong to me, but what do I know?
-Peter
Dell does refuse to trouble shoot anything but an authorized configuration, meaning what they shipped, or someother setup that they support explicitly. It is a corporate standard, no touchie the insides....of course us server monkies never RTFM or follow the rules :)Although I've had real good luck with Dell support, their phone people are sharp and quite helpful.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
I suppose that I don't have as much an issue with the wi-fi "hacking", per se, as much as I have an issue with it being "news"...
l oriousnoise.com/l en/
Both Ellen and Apple must be doing _something_ right - Ellen apparently has a bit of a following:
http://www.ellenfeiss.net/
http://ellenfeiss.g
http://www.wemakedotcoms.com/el
Besides, I can't tell you the number of times I've had to "hack" something on linux to make it work with something that wasn't designed to work with it anyhow - wireless cards included.
I just powered down and did this fix. First time I have ever got 4 bars in my living room.
Thanks pafischer!! and Thank You Slashdot.
This rocks.
Is there a HOWTO somewhere on this sugar in the coffee thing? Will it work with my system? I tried it once but I got stuck because my espresso machine only has one mouse button.
A lot of radio devices nowadays (Some WLAN cards included) support automatic power control - Power is automatically reduced to the minimum needed for communication.
The RF portion is probably in the 20-40% range. Either way, it's a difference of maybe 2 watts consumption vs. 1 watt consumption at the worst, which is a tiny fraction of the power consumed by most laptops these days...
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
If the company spent the time and money to modify the Prism2/2.5/3 reference designs for 200 mW transmit, there's a good chance they improved receive sensitivity too.
Not sure about the Engenius card listed in this article, but it is a close relative of the Demarctech ReliaWave 200 mW card, which has a receive sensitivity spec that's significantly better (-96 dBm) than even Orinoco cards, which are one of the best ones receive-wise. FAR better than average Prism2 cards, which suck.
And you're also wrong about the antenna position - Look at the pictures in the article, the antenna is on the end of the card, it is NOT inside the box.
Lastly, the article mentions availability of an external antenna option for these cards - Not an option for the internal AirPort card.
These three things added up equals a solution that will blow away the internal AirPort configuration away.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Info on the Demarctech card:
z /r eliawave-rwz-200mw-prism2-5-pcmcia-card.html
http://www.demarctech.com/products/reliawave-rw
They get pretty good reviews on the NetStumbler forums.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
The forums there have some excellent antenna discussions.
I know www.fab-corp.com has some "blade" antennas that will stick on the back of a laptop, but I'm sure these suffer from some pretty nasty pattern distortion due to the display occluding half the antenna pattern. Still, they're not too cumbersome and should be an improvement.
There are a few small "desktop" antennas available at www.fab-corp.com and www.hdcom.com (I think that second URL is correct...)
Also, even a homebrew quarter-wave "toothpick" antenna (see the NS forums) is a pretty good improvement over the internal antenna of an Orinoco or similar card. Probably wouldn't be too hard to devise a way to clip it or stick it to the back of the upper edge of a laptop's display casing.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
I've had Apple overnight a HD on one occasion and on another occasion, a keyboard (coffee spill disaster). They didn't even ask for the damaged items back. All under warranty, free of charge. Apple support is O.K. in my book.
My University uses Cisco LEAP to keep unauthorised people off their wireless network. PCs work with Cisco cards, and MacOS X 10.[12] work with internal Airport cards.
When it asks for your password, just use , and it works. Can you do this with a cheap card and drivers?
God save our Queen, and Heaven bless The Maple Leaf Forever!
I just did this and it WORKS. In my basement office I get ZERO reception, maybe one bars flickers on for a second or two every few days (I use an ethernet cable when I'm down here). After doing this little trick I'm getting three bars and a workable connection (four bars if I adjust my position - I'll have to move my desk)
From the threads on Ars it looks like you could get even better reception if you could do the same thing to the antenna on the other side. It does seem (just playing around with it right now) that it favors the side with the battery. It seems I get better reception if I rotate the book so that the side with the battery (where I just adjusted the antenna) I get better reception than if the other side (with the DVD drive) is facing the base station.
I used to work for a school system as a technician, and I had no trouble getting replacement parts, including motherboards, from Apple. Our school district signed up with AppleOrder and AppleService which allowed us to login to their website, pick which part we needed, select if it was under warranty or not (and enter serial # so they could confirm it), and Airborne Express would be there the next morning with the replacement part. It was really very quick and easy, and was much better than dealing with Gateway when we needed a fix under warranty. I'm not sure what cost, if any, there was to use it, but considering I had to order parts twice a week from them, it really was handy.
sharkyfour.com
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