[rescue] PB 1400s

[Geoffrey S. Mendelson]

On Wed, Jan 26, 2005 at 01:54:54PM -0800, Sheldon T. Hall wrote:

> Will other WiFi cards work?  Does the Apple want a particular chipset or
> something else?  Generic 801.11b cards are getting pretty cheap here in The
> Big PX; everyone seems to be switching to 802.11g, so the 'b' cards have a
> supply/demand imbalance.

Some will, some won't. The problem is that many of the cards never had Mac
drivers. The best ones are the Lucent Wavelan, wich later became the Orinoco
cards. There cards are 5v PCMCIA which is what the old laptops require
and Orinco drivers are availble from MacOS 7.5 on up.

Since Wifi has only been legal for a little over a year here, there are
simply no legacy cards here.

> 
> Most base stations/WAPs/etc. have PCMCIA/PCBus WiFi cards as the actual
> radios.  I've had two EnGenius WAPs crap out, and in both cases the WiFi
> cards were fine.  Nice 200 mW cards with external antenna connectors, too.

That's two problems for me. One is the cards are probably 3.3v Cardbus
(32 bit) which won't work in the laptop and 200mW cards are illegal in 
Israel. The 100mW and short list of channels is rigerously enforced
where I am (about a mile from many government buidlings) both by
monitoring and use of nearby frequencies by the milltary/police which 
case some interesting temporary outages.


> Floating around the 'net is a program that will flip some bits in the card
> firmware and make an Orinoco Silver card take on the properties of a Gold
> one.  I don't have it, since I've never needed it.  There may be details on
> www.seattlewireless.net

I've heard of it. It's a windows program that updates the microcode. It was
actually produced by the manufacturer.

Thanks, Geoff.
-- 
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel gsm at mendelson.com  N3OWJ/4X1GM
IL Voice: 972-544-608-069  IL Fax: 972-2-648-1443 U.S. Voice: 1-215-821-1838 
I may be an old fart, but I'm a high-tech, up to date old fart. :-)