[His Dudeness]

Here's the situation: I have an archaic G3 Powerbook that doesn't have built in Airport. So in order to connect to our new Cox Cable broadband, I bought a DLink USB Adapter. I had problems right from the get go. About every 10 minutes or so of internet use, the whole OS 10.2.8 would lock up hard. I had to force powerdown the Powerbook, and it would boot into my OS 9 partition, and OS X would be gone. So I had to reboot from the OS X install cd and run the disk utility to repair the OS X volume and then fix permissions on it. After about 45 minutes of this, I could reboot into OS 9, then choose the OS X partition as the startup disk. Then I could get connected again, until the next 10 or 15 minutes and then the whole thing would lock up hard again.

So I thought it was a bad DLink product. I bought a USB adapter from www.xterasys.com and downloaded the latest driver for it. Guess what? I get the same problems. Only the last time I managed to get one whole minute before the thing locked up again.

So now my only option left is to buy Apple's new Airport Express when it comes out. This is killing me. Anyone know why USB adapters cause me to go through this pain and agony?

[diamondsw]

Sounds like a bad kernel extension (in this case, the device driver for the adapter). Although they are from different manufacturers, the underlying chipset may be the same.

First, check for the latest driver on the manufacturer web site. If there is one, it's likely to fix your problem.

Second, turn on journaling on your OS X drive - this won't stop it from crashing, but it will greatly reduce the impact of these crashes on your system.

After that things get sticky. I'm in a similar situation, trying to upgrade my wireless network from (b) to (g), and there's just no way to get my late-2002 iBook onto a (g) network at full speed. So it's either stick with (b) speeds or get a new laptop. It's a shame, as I really wanted to use Airport Express.