Hi Drew,
I need a little advice on going wireless. I have a Pismo and an iMac, also a 1400. What cards work in the Pismo and the iMac (802.11b and .11g?) I am thinking about buying a 802.11b router. Would a faster router be better? Do I have to buy an Apple Airport card to work in the iMac? I am planning on buying a PCMCIA card for the Pismo. Any info appreciated. Mucho gracias.
David
David,
The same 11b cards that work in the 1400 will work in the Pismo. The cards whose manufacturers write drivers for the Mac OS are the ones that I always recommend - Farallon/Proxim, Lucent/ORiNOCO/Proxim, and MacWireless. There's also the internal AirPort card for the Pismo... There are a whole bunch of other cards that don't come with Mac drivers that can be used with the 3rd party IOXperts drivers (go to <http://www.ioxperts.com/> for details on which cards will work). The IOXperts drivers are pretty good, but I think it's generally better to support OEM development rather than 3rd party after-market support. The more OEMs bringing Mac products to market, the better!
There's an 11g card that works on Macs built by Buffalo. You can buy it from OWC, I think. MacWireless also has one. Both require OS X, I think (no OS 9 drivers).
I don't know a whole lot about iMacs, so someone else will have to tell you which models can take internal AirPort cards and which cannot. But if you want to go with an internal card, it will have to be an AirPort card. Otherwise, you can use an 11b USB adapter (again, MacWireless has these). If you want 11g, it will have to be an ethernet<->11g transceiver. Again, you guessed it, MacWireless makes these. You won't get full 11g speeds unless you've got 100baseT ethernet, but I think all iMacs have that (except maybe the Bondi one).
Faster routers aren't always better. But planning for the future isn't bad, either. An 11g access point would be handy if you transfer large files on your network frequently. Otherwise, 11b will almost certainly be faster than any broadband net connection you are likely to get in the next 5 years or so. I think the nightmare of incompatible brands and standards (11g is SUPPOSED to be backwards compatible with 11b independent of manufacturer but in the beginning there were lots of problems). So other than price (and Mac OS 8/9 compatibility), I can't think of any reason why you shouldn't be looking at 11g products.
One thing to keep in mind: I've read (though I can't recall exactly where) that with some 11g products ALL clients will slow down to 11b speeds whenever an 11b client is connected. You'll have to research this on your own, though, as I have no more details than that.
Does that help you at all?
Peace, Drew
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