2005 iBooks, with a lot of RAM, lose Airport Extreme connectivity

Posted on 20/10/2005, 11:14 pm, by Colin Charles, under Life, LinuxPPC, MacOSX/Apple.

Yay, 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.

byte

firmware fixed said problem... it works just fine now

MathP

I have the same problem on my iBook G4 12" with 1.5gb RAM (third party). It never crashed before, and since the last security update, it crashes constantly (sometimes crashing during the boot process). I 'fixed' the problem by turning AirPort off, but let's just say that I'd rather have a more convenient solution.

Andry

Autor, Respect!

bobby

I just got a new 1.67 Powerbook last week...two gigabytes of RAM. I've had this problem all weekend long, and found your site while doing a search. So yes..it exists with the 15" powerbooks as well.

Another fun bug: the newer powerbooks USB ports don't always push enough power to support the Digidesign MBox...after a firmware update to the MBox, the left port will power it, the right one will not...it just flickers on and off. How nice.

byte

I dunno if the Powerbook really shows it. I have a new Powerbook, but I think I did apply the update after a day. In fact, I applied *all* the updates from 10.4.2 to 10.4.3 via Airport and it didn't filch, so I have no idea what was going on there. Heck, when I reinstalled the iBook from 10.4 and did the upgrade to 10.4.3, it also didn't seem to affect me. It was only 10.4.2, bugg as.

I haven't seen that problem for the sole purpose that I've upgraded to using the powerbook (and am not seeing the error). Re the iBook, it now runs Linux where the airport really isn't supported atm, so I'm quite unsure if it happens. If time does permit, I'll try transferring something large and seeing if the iBook chokes.

MalEbenSo

I used to have this problem ("jumping mouse pointer, Airport stalls, kernel_task eats CPU") on my iBook G4 with 1.5 GB RAM. I was "glad" in a way that the PowerBooks show the same symptoms, because that means that even more users are affected and Apple just cannot ignore it.

I applied 10.4.3 and Airport 2005-001 updates both in one step.

I don't suffer the jumping cursor any more at all. No problems with kernel_task running high on CPU.

But the problem still isn't completely fixed: Airport now runs anywhere between 5 and 15 minutes before it stops transfering data. I still see full signal strength, but nothing will pass. At least turning Airport on/off fixes this rather than a system reboot. But even so, having to cycle Airport every 10 minutes is so annoying that Airport is still useless for me.

Anybody else seeing this new problem?

Thomas

/me too.

I was beginning to wonder if my OS had gotten corrupted: this is the same exact thing I'm seeing. 1.33Ghz iBook, 1.5GB of RAM. While it is third party RAM, it has also passed every memory checker that I can find with zero errors and I've had no suspicious crashes... come to think of it, I don't think I've yet had this machine crash. But, after a semi-random time of use, the Airport drops. Usually, I go from 4 arc bars of signal strength to zero & it can't see any SSIDs at all. A couple of times, the signal strength meter still reads fine, but no traffic will pass. And, yes, a reboot clears it right up -- which is rather annoying when I've got 15+ tabs open in Safari. Grrr.

byte

I got myself a reply from Apple. It is a known issue, and its being investigated by engineering.

Apparently, there's been a change in design of the newer iBook's. I personally don't know, and can't say what exactly is the problem. Its an annoying one, that I hope gets fixed with newer Airport updates, ASAP.

This is akin to scratching iPod Nano's and what not. If we can get enough annoyed folk, Apple needs to get this fixed, ASAP.

ssp

It looks like you're just listed all the (un)educated guesses making their way across the web. Have you gotten any helpful information about this? While Apple seem to be aware of the problem, they don't seem to have given any helpful answer yet. And most of the discussions on their site or ars technica's seem to be non-coordinated rambling.

The most plausible (to my uninformed brain, anyway) reason for the problem happening seems to be a problem with Apple's hard- or software once you start using more than 1GB of the memory. I don't really know whether this is possible in the Unixy world of OSX, but would it be possible to just write an application that just blocks the top 512MB of RAM in situations where you need to keep your network connection running? Hoping that this is fixable, it would help in the time until the fix surfaces.

Naveed

Interesting article Colin. However, I'm guessing that the Airport card crashes must have more to do with the bump in processor speeds with the advent of the new iBooks, rather than the increase in RAM. I had an 800MHZ iBook G4 for over two years before I sold it off to buy a Powerbook and had bumped up the RAM to 1.128GB by purchasing a gig stick (3rd party RAM was good enough for me being a college student ;)). I didn't have any issues with dropped signals or crashing Airport cards whatsoever.

With the new iBooks, I'm sure the increase in RAM does have a lot to do with the crashes but IMO, faster running processors are primarily to blame.

Cheers!

Colin Charles Agenda