[shifuimam]

I recently acquired an 800MHz DVI TiBook for free from work. It had sat unused for a year and a half in a guy's office, so I figured I'd update it to Leopard and use it for testing compatibility in Safari and whatnot.

I know that history shows that this line of PowerBooks had some pretty major problems with wireless reception.

Is there a fix for this, or do I need to use a PCMCIA wireless card to get remotely good reception? I'm sitting here literally twelve feet from my wireless router and am still not getting a full signal showing in my Airport icon. Kinda sucks.

[amazing]

I had a Ti-400 and the reception was absolutely abysmal. I finally bought a PCMCIA wireless card for it and the difference was night and day. It rivaled the reception of an iBook that I was testing at that same time--and the iBook was known for excellent reception.

Save yourself a lot of grief: sell off the internal card and get a natively supported PCMCIA card.

[shifuimam]

I've actually got a WaveLAN Silver card ganked from an original ABS. I may just use that for the time being. Unfortunately, the internal card's got to stay since the machine isn't actually mine.

Is there a way to either disable the internal card or tell the Airport software to use the PCMCIA slot instead, or would it be easier just to remove the card until I return the machine?

[amazing]

Just insert the card and go to Network Prefs. Setup a new network location that turns the card on and turns off the internal card. That worked quite well for me.

Just be careful to withdraw the card while you're transporting it. The plastic antenna portion that sticks out of the slot can be bent much too easily.

And that Wavelan Silver will only be giving you 40-bit WEP, might as well not have any protection on your wireless access point. Way back when, I found an 11-g card for very cheap, $25 at Target. There may be similar deals out there nowadays, especially if you're going to be using this for awhile and are concerned about security on your wireless access point.

Taking the card out is quite a hassle, since you have to take the bottom case off. Which in itself is not hard, but you inevitably want to use the feet on the bottom case to position the case for putting the screws back in, and you risk ripping off the bottom feet--a problem if it's not yours.

And if work wants to eventually give that Ti-800 away, it would be quite useful to a high-school student or even an elementary student. (edit: it's a Ti-800, natch)

[shifuimam]

I flashed my Silver to Gold in Windows, so it supports 128-bit WPA now.

I don't frequently use wireless with this at the moment...we'll see. I may end up going with a different card or something.