iBook AirPort Card, weak signal?

Hi,

I recently got an ibook 1ghz g4 12". I'm having some difficulties with the AirPort card. I do get a signal when I'm at places with a wifi router, but it is always a weak signal (iStumbler shows about 21, on average). Over at an apartment with the ibook right next to a dell laptop, the dell's wireless is fast but the ibook drops a lot of packets and has a weak signal.

Looking at the AirPort card, the antenna jack looks like it is connected fine, though I haven't tried unplugging and reconnecting.

Any ideas? Other than the airport card, it seems to work fine. Hope I don't have to have it shipped for warrenty (and risk having more troubles, losing data on harddrive, etc, etc).

yoda13 said:

go ahead and take it out and put it back in. It might just solve it.

Click to expand...

Just tried and still seems the same. Though, I don't have my own base station to test, but it didn't improve the signal I'm getting of some close-by one.

Btw, does anyone else have a little magnet on the upper part of the keyboard (underneith the keyboard), in about the center, about where the numlock key is?

Stopped by apple store today and had one of the guys at the genius bar look at it. He ran some tests and played with it and recommended I exchange it, that something was pretty screwy. It was even dropping the signal _inside_ the apple store. Probably the antenna. I hope my new ibook gets here soon!

mcadam said:

Well, now hopefully your problem has been solved, but anyway...

I'm having the same probs with my 1ghz 17" pb and after looking around the net for solutions there seem to be 2 possible reasons that you can do something about yourself:

1) as allready mentioned, make sure the antenna cable is fixed properly

2) apparently the newest version of the airport software (3.4 i think) is not really stable or whatever...so downgrading to 3.2 (i think) has been a solution for some !?!

Anybodys got some advice on that?

Click to expand...

I tried both and neither worked. I also have heard that 3.4.1 fixes the 3.4 problems. The problem was defiantly hardware for me: When running iStumbler, the signal would ALWAYS be around 20 + a lot of signal dropping on and off. Whether inside the apple store (genius bar guy liked how it dropped it inside store), sitting at house and seeing a neighbor's wifi, or at coffee shops with free wifi.

Go download iStumbler and see how much your signal varies between places, would be my only thought.

Good luck!