Old Power Mac G5 and brand new Airport Extreme Base Station...help please

Before you go to any major expense or effort, try a USB wireless adapter. They're very small and inexpensive, can be very effective, and if you buy locally you can always return it for a full refund if it doesn't do the trick.

I had the same problem with a Windoze box and solved it initially with a humongously long cable which my daughter's dog chewed through, then solved it permanently with such a USB network adapter without touching the internal card. Has been working like a charm. It was about $30, but there are cheaper ones now—as low as $18 or so at the local Fry's.

Yes, it works with b, g, or n network. I have an N-network through a "NETGEAR RangeMAXnext wireless-N Router". The USB adapters are pretty generic. The one that solved my problem happens to be a NETGEAR brand N150 Wireless USB Adapter . It even picks up an Airport wireless secured network from a neighbor about 200'-300' across the street, and I tested it also on my MDD G4, as well as on my wife's MacBook and her Mac Mini. Works on all of them, but is only needed on the Windoze Toshiba laptop that has a wonky internal one.

Do you have the "T" shaped airport antenna installed on the back of the G5?

Is the software in the G5 up to date?

I did go buy a USB adapter....seems to be working great!

That's good.

One last item would be to check the connections of the Airport card.

Removal and reinstallation of the card is worth a try.

Power Mac G5 AirPort Card Replacement Instructions (Do It Yourself ...

TT32872 wrote:

… I did go buy a USB adapter....seems to be working great!

Glad it worked for you. 🙂

that was a great suggestion you gave him, but as i read, i am not sure if you answered his question?? and the reason i point it out, is it is now my question lol, is it possible to upgrade the current AirPort extreme wireless card that is inside my PowerMac G5 and my specs are almost identical to the original post...(btw? how you get 6GB of ram? they told me only 4GB) ...could i go to apple and say Hey give me a AirPort extreme wireless card and pop in the brand new one.

Hardware Overview:

Machine Name: Power Mac G5

Machine Model: PowerMac7,3

CPU Type: PowerPC G5 (3.0)

Number Of CPUs: 2

CPU Speed: 2 GHz

L2 Cache (per CPU): 512 KB

Memory: 4 GB

Bus Speed: 1 GHz

Boot ROM Version: 5.2.4f1

Serial Number: YM5****DPRU2

i am STILL using 10.4.11 but do have a disc to upgrade to 10.5 if need to.

AirPort Card Information:

Wireless Card Type: AirPort Extreme

Wireless Card Locale: USA

Wireless Card Firmware Version: 405.1 (3.90.34.0.p18)

Current Wireless Network: The Daily Gothic

Wireless Channel: 1

Sorry, you can't upgrade the Aiprt card at all, but USB Wifi adapters are available...

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Asus/USBN10/

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/NewerTech/MXP2802NU2C/

AS far as RAM, there were 2 PM7,3 models, one had 8 RAM slots & one had only 4 slots...

http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/powermac_g5/stats/powermac_g5_2.0_dp_pci.h tml

http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/powermac_g5/stats/powermac_g5_2.0_dp_2.htm l

wow, thank you so much for the quick repsonse, based on what you said, i grabbed the one with 4 slots, lol... side question, i was only looking to upgrade the card because of slow download speeds on my home network, i have an AirPort express, that is N rated, you think i wil get better speeds by running an ethernet cable to this as oppsosed to being on WiFi net work? and thank you for the links.

Yes, Ethernet should be faster, depending on Router, but what speeds do you get now?

What do you get for raw speeds here, for both Java & Flash, DSL Reports...

http://www.dslreports.com/stest

the speeds i get now are from a different site, over my wifi network to my MacBook Pro, i wil get as high as 30Mpbs to low end 16Mbps down, and consistantly 3Mbps up, but over my wifi network on the PowerMac i wil barely get 3Mbps down

i wil run the test now from the sites you suggested, and post the speeds, but what i was asking before, is i have a N rated AirPort express right by my G5, i use it to extend my network, and i have my printer hooked up to it, if i run an ethernet cable from my G5 to the N rated AirPort express, as opposed to using the wifi, would i get better speeds? also the routher i use is a 2nd gen Apple TimeCapsule 1TB

The G5 is 3 feet from the AirPort express that is why i was curious about just running a cable from the computer to the express.

I don't know what speed Ethernet Port is in the Router, but even 100 Base can do 100 Mbps Full Dublex, 802.11g can do up to 54 Mbps half duplex, which means a max of about half that, no idea why yours is so slow.

Might trty enlarging the buffers in Terminal...

The default send and receive buffer sizes can be set using the following sysctl variables, in Terminal:

sudo sysctl -w kern.ipc.maxsockbuf=262140

sudo sysctl -w net.inet.tcp.sendspace=131070

sudo sysctl -w net.inet.tcp.recvspace=131070

It will revert to defaults on reboot, so no worry, might be a good test though.

Also, open Network Utility>Info tab, select Airport & see what the Link speed is & if there are any errors on the right.