We have a G4 and a couple G5 PowerMac towers in use by the Quarterly and communications staff of the Alumnae Association. The Macs are still running strong. I recently upgraded them to Leopard and installed Microsoft Office 2008 without a hitch. Unfortunately , the offices are up on the third floor of Mary Woolley Hall where they still have a 10 Mbps network. Because we are located in a College owned building and share the network with the Development offices the 10 Mbps switch or hub is beyond my control.
The cabling and switch were upgraded on the first and second floors when the offices were renovated last year. The networking department told me that they were going to upgrade the cabling and switch last summer along with the addition of some more outlets. However, that has not occurred yet. It is now February.
What was upgraded over the past year was the College's wireless network. There are now access points in every dorm and throughout the campus, except on the third floor of Mary Woolley but there is a signal that ranges between 20-40% in strength depending on where you are located.
With the wireless upgrades I thought the solution would be to install some Airport cards in the Power Macs and pull the computers off of the wired network, thinking that even with the reduced signal strength, going wireless would be faster.