Music • Sound • Video • Art

I’ve been offline for a few days due to the “unexpected”. Fortunately the story turns out well in the end….

1. So. I start up my nice (relatively) new 8-Core MacPro and no wireless network. Nada. Zip. Zilch.
2. Says “No Airport Card Installed”. Odd because it was there yesterday….
3. I pop the case, reseat the airport card. Nothing.
4. I zap the P-RAM. Bupkus.
5. I reinstall the 10.5.7 Combo Update.  Nothing.
6. I boot from the OS CD. (If it is a software issue, booting from the CD will let you know ’cause if suddenly it works some file or set of files on your boot HD must have been corrupted and you will need to reinstall the operating system.) Still, “No Airport Card Installed”.
7. Everything else is fine. Computer works great. Can’t figure it out.
8. I take it to MacMedics. Nice guys. They put it through a battery of diagnostics. Nothing flags as broken on their tests, but the damn thing doesn’t work.
9. They order a new airport card and have it overnighted from Apple. Pop it in. Still no wireless.

At that point ($200 down and counting), they suggest replacing the logic board. Much more money than I want to (or can) spend…

…considering the fact that good alternatives exist….

…for a hundred bucks…. (read on)

Damn this works well...

Look, a tip for anyone who wants to bring a machine with ethernet into a wireless network: Get an ethernet bridge. I bought one from Linksys (WET610N). Dual-Band, easy as hell to set up. And the kicker? My download speeds are triple what I used to get using the airport card. To be fair, I think that is because I can place the bridge unit ABOVE my studio table which is chock full of rack modules and power supplies and electrical cords (and fields). The ethernet bridge sits on top of one of my monitors and has a relatively clear line of site to the (also Linksys) dual-band wireless router upstairs. (Yes I said Linksys. I gave up on my Airport Extreme after Apple posted an update that made the thing almost useless, didn’t acknowledge the issue, and took months before releasing a patch that supposedly fixed it.)

I said it’s easy to set up and it is EXCEPT you need access to a PC for the initial set up. Any PC will do, but I seem to recall it needs to be a real physical PC.