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jwtseng · Sep 22, 2004, 03:27 PM

Hello all,

I just inherited a first generation 400mHz Titanium PowerBook. Since Airport cards for this model are limited to 802.11b and give poor reception anyway in this Titanium, I'm looking for PC card alternatives of the 802.11g variety. It's been a while since I've looked at the market for these things, so I'm not sure if OS X (10.3) supports any of these cards natively or what.

Thanks for your assistance!

SierraDragon · Sep 22, 2004, 04:03 PM

Consider if you _really_ need Extreme reception. If you are in one location like a house or office an Airport card from eBay will work fine and not take your PC card slot. I oversee a TiBook 400 AP in an old house/office and it works fine everywhere in the house.

jwtseng · Sep 22, 2004, 04:08 PM

SierraDragon,

The problem is that I made the switch to 802.11g in my home about a year ago, and any 802.11b device would cause my network to throttle down to accomodate. Since I do a lot of video streaming, that would not be good. I disallow 802.11b interoperability in all my routers and APs.

Thanks for the input though. I really appreciate the help.

amazing · Sep 23, 2004, 11:26 AM

I've got a Ti-400: The airport range with the internal card was totally, completely inadequate. 20-25 feet. This is a well-known problem with the 1st gen Ti. I got a Cisco Aironet 802.11b PMCIA card and the range is equivalent to an iBook, ie excellent with no loss of bandwidth.

PMCIA is the only way to go. It's said that Broadcom g-chips are supported natively in Panther. Sorry, can't remember which cards have them...

jwtseng · Sep 23, 2004, 12:35 PM

amazing,

Thanks for the info on the Broadcom G stuff.

Does anyone know if there is a list somewhere of the PC cards and their underlying chipsets?

madmacgames · Sep 23, 2004, 02:16 PM

Macsense makes wifi cards natively supported in OS X (claim they just use the Airport drivers):
http://www.macsense.com/Product/broadband/wpe800.html

MacWireless makes some that use the Airport drivers:
http://www.macwireless.com/html/prod...1gCardbus.html

There is also another company making wifi PCMCIA aimed for Macs as well, but I can't remember their name (it was a play on airport, but I can't recall or find them).