Suggest a new wireless card or usb device

[jonmitz]

I have trouble with my airport card while in vista. The driver's for it (broadcom) are so bad that I get latency problems with audio (which causes a lot of problems, since I do a lot of audio work).
Even beyond those problems, my signal strength I get when I boot into vista is barely 1 bar, and often drops out, while in the same spot in mac os x I get a full signal.

I've been trying to work around this for the past months but it just isnt working, and I'm going to buy a usb device or another card (can the mac pro take two?)

Also, I'm afraid ethernet is not an option unless I buy a 100 foot cable+ and run it all over my house

If anyone has any particular suggestions, please post them here! I need a strong enough device to get a good signal through a house (1 floor up, ~15 feet over). I'm hoping someone uses a wireless USB with their vista 64 bit and has no audio latency problems... anyone?

In case it matters it is a first gen mac pro

 

[Scoox]

Hi Jonmitz, did you manage to solve this? I am having exactly the same problem with my Mac Pro's built-in Airpro Extreme wireless card in XP. In Leopard I get full signla strength but in XP I barely get 1 line and constant audio dropouts. I used a small application called DPC Latency Checker which shows that the Airport Extreme card interrupts the processor at regular intervals. As a result, my USB audio interface cannot get enough attention from the system during the periods when the Airport Extreme is interrupting the CPU and audio dropouts occur. I think it is a driver problem but I have not been able to find driver updates for Windows so I think I am going to try a different wireless card, unless you have found a solution.

 

[UltraNEO*]

just a suggestion...
You could buy a AirPort Express and set it up to boost the signal, rather than create a new WIFI network (Think it's called bridge mode)... Then maybe place it mid way!

Alternatively, buy something dedicated to the PC side of things, you can pretty much buy anything that's made for PC and it'll work! However, only a few of them are both Mac and PC compatible but if the Mac side is fine on the built-in device.. .then just buy something you know, for BootCamp...er... PC

Belkin has some decent wifi tools, also checkout netgear.