Certainties Crumbling

Posted on 2008/09/11 21:19:34 (September 2008).

[Thursday 11th September 2008]

On the sad anniversary of the attacks on the twin towers, and close to the experiment that almost blown up the entire earth, I have to report that the wireless capabilities of my MacBook have been working quite strangely recently...

It seems that the actual adaptor inside the laptop is not working well, because the other clients in the house are doing extremely well.

This poses my undisputed faith in Apple products to a very hard trial.

I have to say that the computer has been doing remarkably well for more than 1 year, then recently when I installed Leopard, things started to get worse... The fact that I had to hard reboot (by pressing the power up button for 5 seconds) 3 times in the last month to me is quite a rare.

This happening made me think that it has been more than 1 and half year since I have been using a Windows system seriously at home, and I do not really miss it. My PC is a sort of game box at the moment, while Macs handle all the rest, from torrents to image editing, music and so on.

Still the recent problems are casting some shadows over my already black MacBook, and that's why I have decided that I need some sort of backup system to help me keep all the important files that I have. On that story, Matteo, one of my best friends, will help me out with the setting up of the actual software to run backups...

Oh well, that's it really nothing more to tell, quite boring post I know! :D

My MacBook is over a year-and-a-half old now, it gets pretty heavy use, and I haven't had any problems at all with it yet.

...mind you, I haven't installed Leopard on it.

Posted by John at 2008/09/12 08:10:06.

John: I think that Leopard is the culprit... I have found so many posts about this problem on the net... Oh well, maybe the new Macs have a different hardware for Airport that is not totally compatible? Beats me!!

Posted by Lox at 2008/09/12 08:27:33.

Hi both. Well as I said yesterday, my own Leopard unit has been totally fine. No problems what so ever. The only cause of any hard-resets has been third-party software getting itself in knots.

If I remember, the BootCamp drivers for the Mac hardware have Broadcom wifi drivers - nothing odd or unusual about those.

On moving up to Leopard I've noticed only improvements - honestly, not just spin.

From a technical viewpoint, it *is* possible that you have a faulty airport module - poo happens :-( But I wonder if these drop-outs might be more likely caused by interferrence from other equipment, given how reliable your MacBook has been for so long.

Also, when people tell me they are "torrent" 'ing I just think of wide-open systems and it makes me shudder!!! :-D

Posted by Nigel at 2008/09/12 08:50:48.

Nigel: Actually Airport Express gave me some problems in the past, but I managed to overcome those. I do not think that the HW is faulty, usually it either fails or works, not "mid way" situations like I have experienced. As for P2P I download stuff once every 5 months from home, and my router is blocking all doors, so it is not something that I do so often... Plus the drop-outs happened all of a sudden in a period where I am not downloading anything... I switched to an older firmware of the Airport Express (APoint) and switched channels, now it seems to be working (at least it did this morning), I want to see this afternoon when I go back, but I suspect that it's something to do with interferences from other apartments, or machines... let's hope is that at least!

Posted by Lox at 2008/09/12 10:21:32.

Funnily enough I've just been reading an article where it is explained how much more stable, reliable and jolly-good all round the 64-bit version of Vista is. Whereas the 32-bit version is the bad one. I've never tried the 64-bit version but it might be worth investigating.

Posted by Nigel at 2008/09/12 16:54:16.

Nigel: Vista? Is it something to eat?

Posted by Lox at 2008/09/12 18:21:52.

LOL!!! :-D

Posted by Nigel at 2008/09/12 19:48:55.

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