[Eleph]

Anyone ever hear of this: I have an AEBS and cable modem. 4 computers use this network and three of them have no issues, including a G5 iMac, but my G5 powermac needs to be constantly restarted to use the internet, email, etc, even though it still 'sees' the network and shows good signal strength. Basically it appears to have a 'threshold' of bandwidth activity and once it exceeds it, it will not work properly again until the OS is restarted. Example: if it is used occasionally on sites that are not intensive (no video, audio, or tons of flash, etc) it will sometimes work for a few days, but then hit it hard by trying to download something and it's gone. Using it hard by heavy downloading/uploading, it'll go about 45 minutes to an hour between restarts. The exception is that if I turn airport off, then on again I can sometimes get maybe two or three pages to load (slowly) until only a restart will get it going again.

This condition *does not* occur when using ethernet, either direct from the modem or from the 'out' port on the AEBS, which I've done for the past few years to avoid it....it'll run fine for weeks like that, but now I've moved to a new house where the AEBS is too far away to run a cable and am forced to run it through the wireless and it's far too annoying to deal with anymore.

In trying to fix this, I tried a fresh install of 10.3, then 10.4, every airport update, etc....all the obvious stuff, but it never changed anything or helped. I also tried another AE unit, but I'm certain it's not in the base since the other computers work fine. The only thing I can think of is that the card itself is bad, but don't want to spring the ~80 for a new one until I know I've ruled out every other possible cause.

Any ideas are much appreciated.....thanks.

[Raining Down in Texas]

I've had two original Airport cards that exhibited similar behavior. I believe that it's a thermal cycling issue - there's a cracked trace on the Airport board somewhere that separates after the board warms up for a while, leading to a loss of actual signal. When I swapped these cards to other machines, those machines behaved the same way, so the problem followed the card.

If your pattern is similar mine, here's what you can look forward to: the duration of useful connection will continually decline until it's zero. The card will occasionally work if you let it "rest" long enough, but you won't have a reliable connection.

Since you're machine has Airport Extreme, at least you can purchase a new card. The original Airport cards are hard to come by and very expensive when you do. I actually use an Airport Express in bridging mode connect my iMac DV to my wireless network, since it can be used elsewhere if needed without dissecting the machine.

[ghporter]

Welcome to the MacNN Forums! Sorry you had to stop by with a problem.

It dounds very much like there's a hardware problem with your AirPort card. I won't say it sounds like a thermal issue as Raining mentioned, but it does sound hardware related.

The good news is that AirPort Extreme cards are not that hard to get and not terribly expensive. The bad news is that it's almost certainly out of warranty, so you'll most likely have to buy one out of pocket. And truthfully, swapping the card out is just about the only definitive way to determine that it's the problem.