2005 iBooks, with a lot of RAM, lose Airport Extreme connectivity
Thursday, October 20th, 2005Yay, yay, I’ll be getting the new 15″ Powerbook. I have to apparently wait around 3-4 weeks, I sincerely hope its going to be a lot shorter than that. As in the 3 week cap, but hey, I’m still excited nonetheless.
I’m massively pissed off at the way Apple is handling their iBook’s with a lot of RAM. Like most people that bought one recently, and decided to go get 1.5GB of RAM in total, they’re all facing similar issues with the Airport Extreme. I got my 1GB stick from the Apple Store, for what it’s worth, so no 3rd party goo.
What happens? After a little bit of network traffic (even minimal at times), or some significant uptime (think, 2-3 hours), the Airport dies. It just stops detecting networks, and the only way to fix this is via a reboot. It seems that the card overheats, and it shuts down. However, it rapidly cools, and there’s no good way to start the card back up again. Firmware bug? Software bug (seeing the kernel_task get really high)? Jumpy cursors?
Rebooting 3-4 times during my typical workday is annoying. It doesn’t help that I’ve been spending time away from my home, and don’t have the luxury of a 100mbps connection. WiFi whoring is the way to go. But not if I have to constantly reboot. Think restarting Firefox, my numerous SSH connections to the Linux machines I need to use, irc, and what not.
For fun reading, visit: Airport quits, restart necessary on the Apple forums, and 2005 iBooks losing Airport under network load. MacFixIt has an article too, bt they require some silly subscription. No, you don’t even need to be running BitTorrent. Trying to upload a 4MB photo to Flickr, with my crappy 128kbps upload speed is enough to heat this card up.
Its a design flaw. And it affects us consumers. I don’t see it being any better under Linux (except that Airport Extreme doesn’t work). I have hope with the bcm43xx project (though on irc, dwmw2 confirmed it doesn’t work yet). So if you picked up one of these babies and are running Linux on it, not certain you have broken hardware, I suggest you give OS X a try, and give your local Apple support center a hard time.