AirPort card weirdness

[jonbravo77]

My wife has one of the older White Books. recently the Airport card has been turning itself on. I have turned it off and watched it turn back on a bit later. Anyone ever seen this? Can it also cause network disruption if she is plugged in ethernet?

Thanks for the advice.

 

[kastenbrust]

It depends what you mean by network disruption, if her laptop is off and its plugged into the ethernet then no nothing is going to happen, it may as well be disconnected!
However if her laptop is on and the ethernet has an internet source then her laptop may try updating or doing its normal housekeeping business, which would slow other peoples internet access down.

With regards to the airport card, i've only ever seen this once on my friends laptop, i know he changed some setting to stop it happening, like 'wake on wireless lan detection' but that was with OS Tiger and ive forgotten sorry.

 

[jonbravo77]

It depends what you mean by network disruption, if her laptop is off and its plugged into the ethernet then no nothing is going to happen, it may as well be disconnected!
However if her laptop is on and the ethernet has an internet source then her laptop may try updating or doing its normal housekeeping business, which would slow other peoples internet access down.

With regards to the airport card, i've only ever seen this once on my friends laptop, i know he changed some setting to stop it happening, like 'wake on wireless lan detection' but that was with OS Tiger and ive forgotten sorry.

Sorry, I should have been more specific in the disruption part. Her network connection will drop causing internet pages not to load and chat program to disconnect for a few seconds and then everything is back. Does nothing to the rest of the network in the house just her computer.

Thank you for the other advice on the wake on wireless, I'll have to look around for that but she runs Leopard so who knows if it's even a setting anymore..

 

[waw74]

on system prefrences -> network
click the small gear looking button at the bottom of the list, then "set service order" make sure that ethernet is above airport.

i believe it defaults to wireless being higher priority.

 

[jonbravo77]

on system prefrences -> network
click the small gear looking button at the bottom of the list, then "set service order" make sure that ethernet is above airport.

i believe it defaults to wireless being higher priority.

Thanks, it shows that Airport is under Ethernet already. so still not sure. Like I asked before if both Airport and Ethernet are active would that cause a problem with her connections to web pages and chat services?

 

[waw74]

it could, but probably not, as long as it's a decent wireless connection.
You might have problems if you loose a wireless connection, and that's what was being used (even if you were connected wired).

if i go from wireless only to wired only, I'll loose internet streams, and sometimes chat.
I'll manually disconnect/reconnect chat, just to make sure i'm still connected if i make the change. But if i connect to wired, and leave the wireless open, it's usually fine.

Most of the time a wireless connection will be faster than your home internet connection. so the only time you will see a difference between the 2 is on data transfers that are entirely within your network.