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Wireless help needed

Plutonius

Plutonius

macrumors G3
Original poster
Feb 22, 2003
9,964
10,910
New Hampshire, USA
I have an MDD G4 running system 10.3.7 and I wanted to add wireless to it. Reading through the different forum threads, I didn't have too many options but the one that was mentioned most was the F5D7000 Belkin pci card which everyone said would run under OS 10.3 . I bought a Belkin wireless G desktop network card (F5D7000 version 3000) and put it in my Mac. Unfortunately, the system profiler does not show the pci card being installed and networking claims I do not have wireless in my Mac. For those that have installed this card successfully, what should I see and what might I be doing wrong ? Also, any suggestions on what else I should try next ?
 
Not sure how. No chips are visible on the PCI card. I will probably have to contact Belkin but what is the chance that technical support will know what chip set is used on the card :).

I also tried to install the wireless card under Virtual PC 7.0 with no success. The setup program on the cd seemed to run ok but the card doesn't show up under device manager. I have never tried to add PC hardware to my Mac while running Virtual PC so I'm not sure if I can add if my Mac doesn't recognize the hardware.
 
I don't think the VPC way will get you anywhere to be honest ..

The Belkin guys can't help you with the chip either .. al lI know is that most broadcom based cards are natively supported by OS X ..
 
I also tried using orangeware's wireless card software for OS X and tried the open source software for OS X with no success.

If I install the F5D7000 Belkin pci card in a PC and get properties on the card under device manager, will it show me the chip set that is used ?
 
Looking through the different post on wireless, many people warned against a USB wireless solution (driver problems) and recommended the Belkin wireless PCI card. Now that I spent the money on this card, I'm just hoping to get it to work :(.
 
edesignuk said:
Perhaps this is me missing something, or just being plain stupid, but why can't you just pop an AirPort card in there? :confused:
Click to expand...

My guess is price?

The MDDs only support the original Airport Card, I think, and those are tough to find at a decent price nowadays. Hopefully someone could tell me otherwise, since this is why I haven't added one to my MDD.
 
Price, availability and the low data rate on the original airport card.

I ended up putting the Belkin wireless PCI card in a PC to see if the card was working and found no problems. I then ran the Belkin config application (while the card was still in the PC) and discovered that the Belkin wireless cards now use the Ralink RT2500 chip set (not compatable with OS X).

In http://www.ralinktech.com in the support section in the Mac forums, a Mac ralink driver is posted that some others had some success with. I'll give it a try tonight and let everyone know how it works.

Note - It sounds like many wireless manufacturers are now using the Ralink chip set (Belkin, LinkSys, etc.).
 
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