http://norman.walsh.name/2008/07/12/hardware 11 51 2008-07-12T13:39:28-04:00 Norman Walsh 2008 Norman Walsh Wireless connectivity has not been my friend this week. But I think I've got it all sorted. Some words of warning for Mac users interested in 3G connectivity. Two independent stories, connected by a common theme: connectivity. First, the wireless router in the house failed, second, my 3G network card made my Mac fail. Mechanical devices fail: they don't call disks “spinning rust” for nothing. But solid state devices are generally more reliable. They ought to run for ages, and many do. So why do wireless routers fail after about two years? (I really am curious. Is there some electro-mechanical part I'm just unaware of?) At least they're easy to replace, and since all the wireless cards in the house are 802.11g, while “n” seems to be the letter du jour, the replacements are cheap. Miffed that two Linksys routers in a row have each failed in about two years, I bought a Netgear one this time. The Netgear wireless print server has been ticking along without a hitch for at least three or four years, I think. Bonus feature: the Netgear device supports reserved DHCP addresses, so I can configure the household laptops to use DHCP but still get a fixed address for them, which is handy. My second story is also about laptop connectivity. Now that I'll be spending several hours a week on the train, as well as the usual hours waiting in airports, I decided to get a wireless card for my laptop. I picked the “GT Ultra Express” because I thought it would be convenient to just slip it into the card slot rather than having it dangling out of a USB port. Man, was that a mistake. The “Ultra Express” card isn't (yet) supported natively so you have to use the third party “GlobalConnect” software. A frank and unrestrained appraisal of that software would be so profane it would make the devil blush. Over the course of two days, I discovered that it could not be relied upon to maintain a connection for more than about two hours (and sometimes considerably less). If the connection failed, so did the software. The software also failed if you disconnected and removed the card. Sometimes it failed when you inserted the card. If the software failed (and, really, even if it didn't), you could be assured that your Mac was unstabled and would crash. The question was, could you shut all your apps down, force-quit the hopelessly wedged GlobalConnect, and reboot before it did? The software also so aggressively disabled all other network devices (WTF?) that it was difficult to get them back even after rebooting the machine. What a steaming pile of… So I returned that card and got one of the USB devices, a natively supported “Sierra USBConnect 881U”. It seems to work fine, and seems not to make the machine unstable. I am a little perturbed that I get an “Internet Connect” dialog box that reads “The selected communication device does not exist. Please verify your settings and try again.” when I suspend and resume the machine. But the network does seem to be working. Deep down, I fear that the GlobalConnect software has f*cked my machine and it won't really be stable again until I scrape it down to the bare metal and do a full reinstall. [Update, 18 July: PostScript: Six days later, guess what failed? That's right, the wireless printer server. Sigh.]