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.
Unfortunately, the particular G5 PoweMac towers in question do not accept the standard Airport cards. Wireless adapters were available as an option when the system was built , but is not available as an add-on. The earlier G5 towers used a combination 802.11g and Bluetooth adapter that Apple does not sell to end users, if it is even still available.
Luckily I came across a small company called AftertheMac which sells a 802.11g USB wireless adapter for all USB equipped G3, G4 and G5 and Intel Macs, including the Apple TV. It is compatible with OS X 10.3 and up. A single adapter costs $45. A four pack is $129. There is a total of four Mac towers upstairs, so I bought the 4 pack.
The adapter and driver installed fine for the most part. I was initially expecting it to work like the Airport adapter, but it does not. The driver has it's own software interface and the IP address has to be assigned manually with DHCP, at least in my case.
The adapter looks like an USB key. It comes with a USB extension cable so that the receiver can be positioned for optimal signal reception.
Unfortunately this was not the solution for everyone. I batted 1 out of 3 in this scenario. did not put the adapter on the student workstation yet. Only one computer had a strong enough signal for a decent sustained connection. The speed increase is between 18-24 Mbps and is only really noticed with larger downloads.
On one computer there was a reoccurring kernel panic with the driver, although another Mac of the same model works fine with the driver. On another Mac the signal strength varied too much and would disconnect at least once a day which was too often when it never had happened before on the slower wired network.