[nhogan]

I'm totally stumped as to how to solve this wireless connectivity problem, and would be eternally grateful to anyone who can help me.

I own a PowerBook G4 with an Airport Card. I've recently relocated to Argentina, where I'm renting a room from a family with WI-FI. There is one other boarder, with a PC laptop, and he has no trouble accessing their wireless network, to the point where he's regularly streaming audio and video. On the other hand, I can only get more than 50% of the bars in "Internet Connect" to light up a very small fraction of the time. Normally my signal hovers between one and three bars, and sometimes it disappears completely. I've tried everything, and nothing seems to work! Here are some facts about the situation:

* I have tried moving the computer around the house with no effect. I've even gone so far as to place my laptop in the exact spot that the other American student keeps his, and cannot pick up more than 1 or 2 bars of power. It will sometimes improve the first minute or two that I move it, and then immediately go back to 0-3 bars of power.

* My problem seems to persist even when none of the other computers in the house are active. In other words, it doesn't seem to be an issue of hogging bandwidth or anything like that.

* I have taken my laptop to a cafe with free WI-FI and it works perfectly. I get 90%-100% of the bars to light up, so the problem does not seem related to my computer's hardware at all.

* The family's signal simply appears in my wireless drop-down window as "default". I don't know if this is relevant to the problem at all.

* I've checked for software updates and everything seems to be current.

If anyone has any ideas, I would really, really, really appreciate them. Thanks so much!

[ghporter]

Check your AirPort card's antenna cable connections. They sometimes come loose, and if not completely connected, they won't get all the signal to the card, and thus the card won't get a good quality connection.

Check Apple's knowledge base for your specific G4 PowerBook model's AirPort card installation instructions-those will tell you how to get at the card to check the connection.

[nhogan]

thanks for your suggestion. i removed and reinserted the airport card a number of times. usually it will work for awhile, and then the signal will again start to drop. it fluctuates dramatically--it will sometimes work perfectly for hours at a time, and then other times it will not even be able to locate the base station.

assuming that the problem is with my computer's hardware, does anyone know if this is a common occurence with airport extreme cards? might mine be slowly dying, so that it works fine sometimes, but not all the time?

is there another possibility aside from a problem with the airport card?

thanks very much for any help, this is driving me nuts... i'm getting ready to order a new airport extreme card from the US, but that's costly enough that i'd like to feel confident that it's actually going to do the trick.

[Nivag]

what router do they have? are they using the 802.11n wi-fi feature on it? i know off a Linksys router that had this switched on and caused problems for a Mac to connect to it.
Once it was switched off everything worked fine.