Sometimes, Macs Just Don’t Work!

Wireless internet connectivity on my Mac PowerBook G4 sucks.

I switched from a five-thousand-pound Windows workhorse laptop to a light, elegant 12-inch Powerbook about two months ago. With the exception of wireless internet connectivity, I’m very pleased … even delighted.

– While it’s true that Mac and Windows computers do many of the same things (and that you can pretty much use the same — or very similar — software packages on either platform), in general, on a Mac, tasks take fewer steps to accomplish. Work goes faster on a Mac.

– Macs are infinitely more stable than Windows machines. Since turning on my PowerBook back in October, I’ve restarted it three times. I used to restart Windows three times a day! On the rare occasion when a program crashes, it doesn’t bring down the who computer the way a misbehaving Windows program can.

– I love being able to simultaneously burn a CD, play music in iTunes, and work in Microsoft Word. On my old PC, burning a CD or working with video demanded so much processor power that other tasks stopped or slowed to a crawl.

However, as mentioned earlier, the Airport wireless internet connectivity on my PowerBook sucks. And it doesn’t just suck a little. It sucks a lot. It my PowerBook’s Airport wireless internet connectivity were a vacuum cleaner, it would be the mother of all Hoovers.

Strangely, this didn’t seem to be the case at first; in fact, during the first few weeks, I could have sworn my PowerBook’s sensitivity to 80211.g signals was better, and that my throughput was faster. Suddenly, though, everything changed … and now my internet connectivity comes and goes, and, when it’s available, it’s often no faster than a dial up connection.

I’m in the unique position of always having a Windows laptop with me — either my own, at my desk, or Clyde’s, when we’re traveling. In every case, whether at home or abroad, the Windows laptop consistently sees more wireless networks than the Mac does … and connects to them at higher speeds with greater reliability.

Here at home, I sit no more than fifteen feet away from our wireless router, and with MacStumbler, I can actually watch my home network signal pop in and pop out. When present, it’s never higher than 50 percent. Heck, in the room — three feet from the router — numbers over 60 are almost impossible to achieve.

– When the time came to upload large graphic files to my publisher yesterday, I could have done it on my Mac (which estimated, given slow speeds and poor connectivity, that the task would take around twelve hours), but I did it on my old Windows machine (which handled it all in about twenty minutes). That sucks.

– While doing research at my own desk in my own home this week, I caught myself writing on my Mac … and doing my web-based research on my old Windows laptop. That really sucks.

Yesterday, I did some research and discovered I’m not the only person who has this issue; some time ago, apparently, one of Apple’s automatic updates to the Airport wireless internet connectivity seems to have had a real and measurable negative impact on wireless performance. I even managed to track down several articles offering some simple — and some extreme — measures users are implementing in an effort to fix the problem.

As a result, yesterday I found myself downloading software, revealing hidden files, digging around in the System Library, extracting files from older versions of the operating system, manually copying them to the appropriate hiding places in the Operating System’s labyrinthine file structure, and rebooting my computer … in short, doing all the same things I used to do on the Windows platform, back when I was a Windows user, in an effort to put things back to the way they were when my PowerBook arrived.

None of these measures worked for me.

And that really, really sucks … especially given the fact that the main reason I switched was because I never wanted to spend three hours doing that kind of thing again.